Chinese Dreams? American Dreams?

CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON SCIENCE EDUCATION:

DISTINGUISHED CONTRIBUTORS

Volume 7

Series Editors

Catherine Milne, New York University, USA

Kathryn Scantlebury, University of Delaware, USA

Cultural and Historical Perspectives on Science Education: Distinguished

Contributors features a profile of scholarly products selected from across the
career of an outstanding science education researcher. Although there are several
variants in regards to what is included in the volumes of the series the most basic form
consists of republication of 8–10 of the scholar’s most significant publications along
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feature include science teacher education, science teaching, language in science,
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change. Collections of articles are placed in an historical context and the rationale
for changing perspectives is provided and analyzed in relation to advances and
changing priorities in science education. Each volume shows how individuals
shaped and were shaped by the cultural context of science education, including its
historical unfolding.
Chinese Dreams? American Dreams?
The Lives of Chinese Women Scientists and Engineers in the United States

Diane Yu Gu
University of California, USA
A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

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 TO MY PARENTS

for teaching me to make the impossible possible

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword xi

Acknowledgments xiii

List of Tables xv

List of Figures xvii

Prologue xix

Section I: The Lived Experiences of Chinese Women Scientists

and Engineers

Chapter 1: Introduction: Chinese Dreams, American Dreams 3

Historical Overview 6
Structure of the Book 9

Chapter 2: The Women I Studied and My Own Family History 13

The Alleged Traitor 所谓的叛徒 13
The Chinese Women Scientists and Engineers I Studied 14
My Family History 15

Chapter 3: Intersectionality and the Culture of Science 29

The Intersectionality of Gender with Race, Nationality, and
Socioeconomic Status 30
Perceptions of Science 31
Behind the Scenes, Yet Critical Factors 33
Gender and Science in a Non-Euro-American Context 34
The Experiences of Chinese Women Scientists 36

Section II: The Academic Environment and Graduate Studies

Chapter 4: Women in Academia 43

Academic Professions and the Importance of Graduate School 43
Women in Graduate Science and Engineering Programs 45
Glass Ceilings: Barriers to Faculty Careers for Women 47

Chapter 5: The Influence of Chinese Academia and Culture 53

Chinese Women 53
Background on Chinese Academia 54

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

History of Women’s Participation in Chinese Higher Education 56

The Cultural Revolution 57
Chinese Graduate Education Since the 1970s 58
Age and Gender Discrimination 60
Confucian Education Philosophy and Student-Professor Relationships 61
Role of Teachers 63
Communication in the Classroom 64
Social Relations and Holidays 64
Disadvantages and Exploitation of Chinese Women Students 65
Adulthood and Marriage 66
China’s Investment in Science and Engineering 67
Academic Corruption and Dishonesty 69

Chapter 6: American Academia: Doctoral Programs 73

Historical Overview of American Graduate Schools 74
Doctoral Programs in the Twenty-First Century 76
Finance and Funding 78
Postdoctoral Adventures 81

Section III: Chinese Women’s Lived Experiences

Chapter 7: Mentoring and Informal Socialization 91

Mentoring 91
Informal Socialization 92
Gendered Mentoring 94
Interactions and Communication with Advisers 97
Dysfunctional Adviser-Advisee Relationships: Impact of a Lack of
Mentoring 99
Advisers’ and Mentors’ Value for Networking 103
NSF ADVANCE: Where Are the Foreign-Born Women? 104

Chapter 8: Career Paths 109

Common Career Paths 109
Discussing Career Expectations with Advisers 112
Student Perceptions of Academic Careers 115
Career Alternatives 117

Chapter 9: Challenges and Stereotypes 119

 119
123
124

viii
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Stereotypes of Docile Chinese Women 125

Chinese Bias 127
Intellectual Property Theft 129
Sexual Harassment 130

Chapter 10: Tacit Knowledge Sharing and Negotiations 133

Imposter Syndrome and Peer Networks 133
Switching Advisers 135
Harmony and Conflict 138

Chapter 11: Sea Turtles Return to China 141

Dual Career Couples 143
Chinese Government-Initiated Projects to Attract American-Educated
Chinese Scientists and Engineers 144
Characteristics of These Initiatives 146
Challenges Faced by Haigui 149
Sheng Nü (剩女): Leftover Women 152

Section IV: Gendered Transnational Networks, Guanxi, and

The Power of Reversed Migration

Chapter 12: Guanxi: Cultural and Social Networks among Chinese Women 159
The Chinese Diaspora Knowledge Network 160
Social Capital and Guanxi 163
National Identity and Generational Differences 165
Novel Ways of Funding 166

Chapter 13: Global Scientific Meshworks and Women’s Careers 169

Meshworks 169
Importance of Professional Conferences 171
The Benefits of Long-Term Collegiality 174
Women Peers and Career Development 177
Career Decisions and Connections 179

Chapter 14: Women’s Transnational Networks 183

Feminization of Migration 184
A Global Network of Women: How Do They Advance Their
Careers beyond National Boundaries? 187
Transnational Network Formation and Globalization
of Science and Engineering Knowledge 188

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Section V: Reflections and Conclusions: Chinese Feminist Perspectives

Chapter 15: Reflections 197

Asian Scientists in the U.S. 197
Disciplinary Differences 199
Gendered Communications 200
Informal Yet Strong Transnational Ties: Family and
Romantic Relationships 201
Research and Industry Collaborations 204
Marginalization and Tacit Knowledge 205
Further Research 206

Chapter 16: Identity Transformation: Chinese Feminist Perspectives 209

Postcolonial Feminism and Women of Color 209
Intersectionality and Feminist Theory 212
History and Current Discourses of Chinese Feminism 213
Globalization and Gender Equality 219
The Uniqueness of Chinese Feminism 221

Chapter 17: Conclusion 227

Never the Main Player: The Reality 227
Returning to China 229
Moving Forward 230
Proactive Solutions 232

References 235

x
 FOREWORD

Dr. Diane Yu Gu has given us an important, powerful, elegant, and provocative

book. It will guide the work of other researchers in several fields around the world.
Women scientists and engineers will recognize themselves, their resources, and
their successful strategies in these accounts; they can build upon, reassemble, and
adapt what others have done. Hopefully, it will lead educators, administrators,
and policymakers to recognize the sources of senseless obstacles in current practices
and how to create more equitable educational and research ecologies. Everyone will
benefit by unleashing the talents of the migrating women scientists and engineers
already working among us everywhere around the world.
This book is important because it addresses a very significant but radically
understudied topic: the situation of migrating Chinese women scientists and
engineers in China and the United States. Many attend to the local and global
migration of scientists and engineers during the last few centuries. Some facilitate
and some exploit that workforce; many profit from it. Very few have attended to
that workforce as gendered and the consequences of that fact. Few attend to the
historically situated political, economic, and cultural resources of that gendered
workforce and how those features shape their migrations, including their difficulties
and successes as scientists and engineers.
This book is powerful because it identifies the shared features in many specific
women’s lives and careers in science and engineering. It also locates patterns in the
particular problems they face, the resources they locate, and the successful strategies
they design to overcome obstacles. They circulate in turbulent currents of assumptions
about gender, family, cultural, geographic, ethnic, and socioeconomic differences,
first in China and then other combinations of those assumptions in their migrations.
They learn that, in spite of the local specificities of those assumptions, they share the
fundamental pattern of intersectionality: social distinctions, whatever their content,
build upon and reinforce each other, and challenging one necessarily challenges the
others, just as reinforcing those in one arena, such as gender, necessarily reinforces
social distinctions in other domains, revealing the reasons for such intense policing
of social distinctions.
This book is provocative because it shows us the extraordinarily high cost of
ignoring gender in the global circulation of science and engineering students,
workforces, infrastructures, ideas, funding, and practices, confining success and
innovation at every turn; it could not have been done better if it were intentional. We
are challenged to ask why and also dismantle the obstructions.
We learn how these migrating Chinese women scientists and engineers shift their
subject positioning and learn new ways to form identities. We learn from them how
to be creative and innovative in that work of making new pathways and deal with

xi
FOREWORD

the terrible cost of not changing. The circulation of knowledge makers strengthens
knowledge work everywhere. Learning how to make that circulation easier for
women scientists and engineers makes those circulation processes better for all.
This book is elegant because it provides an innovative theoretical and
methodological infrastructure to guide us through a very wide array of information
toward compelling conclusions, showing us how to conduct similar studies on
this demanding topic. The subjects of this study, Chinese women scientists and
engineers, circulate across boundaries in their lives, organizations, and work,
developing the skills and knowledge of those who live beyond boundaries. To follow
their pathways Dr. Gu too has elided methodological, theoretical, disciplinary, and
genre boundaries.
She has deployed archival, ethnographic, survey, interview, and oral history
research methods. She has integrated a historical biography of women in her family,
a sociological cohort study of migrating women scientists, a pedagogical study of
gendered peer and cross-generational mentoring, an anthropological study of their
cultural networking practices, and a policy study of the procedures facilitating and
restricting the global circulation of scientists and engineers. Her multi-sited, multi-
methodological project both contributes to and substantially revises interpretive
strategies and findings in the fields of global gender studies, higher education
studies, migration studies, science and technology studies, and policy studies.
Developed and developing countries around the world are eager for more
knowledge makers, including among women, minorities, and migrants. We still
have relatively little understanding of what facilitates or hinders the careers of
such knowledge makers trans-locally. We know that there are significant numbers
of women, minorities, and emigrants in science and engineering; we also now
know that retention is a greater problem than recruitment. Dr. Gu has analyzed the
experiences that shape their decision-making strategies as they choose or refuse
academic careers.
For over a decade the U.S. National Academies of Science and Engineering
have been encouraging the development of interdisciplinary research as especially
creative, innovative, and productive. Research they have sponsored shows that
women, minorities, and emigrants are differentially represented in such fields.
Their strategies for success from the margins gives them resources for working
successfully in new, emerging research fields. We need to facilitate the development
of those strategies among all who make knowledge. Dr. Gu’s important, powerful,
elegant, and provocative study shows us how to do that.

 Sharon Traweek

xii
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

During my bittersweet academic and personal endeavors in Asia, Europe, and North
America, I have encountered many women who made this project possible. Many
women mentors have believed in me, encouraged me, empowered me, and inspired
me to pursue my dream. I am deeply indebted to them as well as the many Chinese
women scientists and engineers who have allowed me to have deep conversations
and observe their daily work and life, and who have been so candid with me about
their experiences in the U.S.
This book would not have been possible without the continuous support
and critical feedback of many scholars and friends in the fields of science and
technology studies, gender studies, higher education, Chinese culture, and history.
Particularly, I would like to express my deep gratitude to my greatest teachers and
mentors, Sharon Traweek, Sandra Harding, and Linda Sax. Mitchell Chang, Jose
L. Santos, Hongyin Tao, Min Zhou, Brad Fidler, Eric Page, Andrea Ghez, Feifei
Jiang, Christine Gabrielse Lin, Jenny Kissinger, and Vivian Wong offered invaluable
feedback and critical thought during various stages of my research leading up to
this book project.
The kind encouragement and exciting work of my friends Aysegul Gogus, Hani
and Frank Freudenberger, Anton Bondarenko, Thomas and Emi Williams, Anuradha
and Puneet Bhatia, Kenji Yamamoto, Neel and Kelsey Sachdev, Csaba Petre, Victor
Mendez, and Berenice Gonzalez have nourished and inspired me throughout the
years. Any accomplishment I have achieved so far is made possible by my loving
parents, Dongmei Hou and Xinsheng Gu, my extraordinary uncle, Yunhao Hou, and
my inspiring husband, Jeffrey Lea. The kindness of my parents-in-law has been
wonderful. I am grateful for the thorough and excellent editing work by Karen
Jarsky, and the support of Michel Lokhorst and all those at Sense Publishers.

xiii
 LIST OF TABLES

Table 1. Full-time engineering graduate and international students

by field (2013) 74
Table 2. Five-year stay rates for foreign students on temporary visas
receiving Science and Engineering Doctorates, for selected
countries, 2001–2011, in percentages 144
Table 3. Chinese government initiatives to recruit overseas scientists
and engineers 147
Table 4. Percentage of foreign-educated among high-ranking
Chinese leaders in 2005 151
Table 5.  Asian countries included in the U.S. Census definition 198

xv
 LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1.  Photograph of my great-grandmother, Xu Shi. 16

Figure 2. My grandmother, Xu Guizhen, speaking at a meeting of the
Inner Mongolia Chapter of the All-China Women’s Federation,
the official women’s rights organization established by the
communist government in 1949. It was the official leader of the
Chinese women’s movement. The picture was taken at her
inauguration speech after her election as the president of
the Inner Mongolia Chapter. 19
Figure 3. My grandmother, sitting in the middle with other male
engineers and Red Guards. This was before the eruption of the
Cultural Revolution. She was one of two women engineers
at a power plant with over 1,000 employees. 20
Figure 4. A typical poster from the Cultural Revolution era.
The red Chinese characters translate as “thoroughly criticize
the ‘theory of human nature’ of the landlord and capitalist classes.”
I remember seeing the original poster in my grandmother’s house
during my childhood. The image is from the IISH / Stefan R.
Landsberger Collections, retrieved from chineseposters.net
with permission. 21
Figure 5. The Chairman Mao button that my grandmother used to wear
on her work jacket every day. This button was on my
grandmother’s jacket when she was wrongfully accused,
imprisoned, and beaten by the Red Guards during the Cultural
Revolution. It was covered in blood when retrieved. 23
Figure 6. An award certificate in both Mandarin Chinese and
Mongolian for my grandmother, issued by the Inner Mongolia
Women’s Federation. The text translates as “To Comrade
Xu Guizhen: In recognition of your outstanding performance
during the Inner Mongolian Provincial Women’s Career
Advancement and Learning Competition, you are awarded
as the female zhuangyuan.” 24
Figure 7. Foreign-born students in science and engineering in the U.S.,
by place of birth. National Science Foundation, Science and
Engineering Indicator, 2014. 47
Figure 8. Translation: “Motherland Needs You, Motherland
Welcomes You, Motherland Has Faith in You!” Source:
Chinese government’s official website for the Thousand
Talents scheme. 145

xvii
LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 9. City leftover women. Translation: The man on the left says,
“She is too educated.” The man on the right says, “She is too
talented.” The writing on the middle block reads, “Urban
leftover women looking for spouses.” 153
Figure 10. The only available image of He-Yin Zhen, possibly taken
when she was in exile in Japan. 214
Figure 11. Cover of Funü Shibao (Women’s Eastern Times) Issue
No. 2 (26 July, 1911). 216
Figure 12. A Mao-era propaganda poster showing a woman working in
the engineering profession. Translation: “We are proud of
contributing to the industrialization of China.” 218

xviii
 PROLOGUE

This is one of the first studies to document foreign-born women scientists’ and
engineers’ education experiences and careers in the U.S., in this case Chinese-born
women, and to examine the strategies they employ to advance careers, establish
networks, promote transnational research collaborations, and secure funding.
It takes a fresh look at the lived experiences of these women and their cultural
backgrounds, with a special emphasis on Chinese-born women, who are especially
numerous, whose numbers are growing, and whose lived experiences and reflections
can tell us a great deal about the emergence of China as a scientific and technological
leader. The ethnographic data of this project becomes even more critical given the
lack of statistical data on the community of foreign-born women in the science
and engineering fields. This book provides their voices, shares their struggles, and
documents their daily experiences and encounters with their environment.
Foreign-born women scientists and engineers who are studying and working in
the United States constitute a rapidly growing yet understudied group. However,
despite being highly educated and well represented in U.S. science and engineering
fields, they remain invisible. Chinese and Indian women make up a significant part
of this group. In the physical sciences and engineering, many of these women have
pursued their undergraduate education in their home countries but have done or are
doing their doctoral work in the U.S. and then remaining to pursue careers. However,
publicly available large-scale data on international students and scholars, including
those from China, is extremely scarce; and what there is rarely indicates the gender
breakdown within such groups. This is one reason that systematic and longitudinal
studies of science and engineering international women students’ mentoring
relationships, gender dynamics, social networks, challenges, and career outcomes
are yet to be seen – a gap this book hopes to fill.
This community of women and their transnational research networks play
increasingly significant roles in the U.S. science and engineering workforce,
particularly in computer sciences and engineering. Chinese women are an especially
fast growing part of this group and are a special focus of this work. It is important to
understand more about the motivation, immigration patterns, career paths, and more
importantly, the gender dynamics of women Chinese graduate students in physical
sciences and engineering programs. In particular, it is crucial to understand the part
of Chinese culture and history that heavily impacts the education system and schema
in China, and how these in turn affect the lives of Chinese women who study and
work in the U.S.
And finally, it is especially important to examine these issues, the racial/gender
discrimination, the absence of mentoring and negative advising relationships, the
prejudices, the sexual harassment, and the special challenges of achieving a balance

xix
PROLOGUE

between work and family facing women living in foreign countries from a Chinese
feminist perspective, one inspired by both Chinese culture and feminism as well as
the works of women of color in the U.S.
My grandmother and mother are engineers, and it is their lives that have inspired
me. However, I did not follow their paths by pursuing a career in science and
engineering. In fact, I had never learned very much about my own family history
until I began my research on Chinese women scientists and engineers. Instead, after
many years of living in China and Europe, I decided to pursue my doctoral studies
in Southern California.
Through my own experience as a Chinese woman in the U.S. and my interactions
with other women, I sadly realized that many misconceptions, misunderstandings,
challenges, and discriminations still largely exist in the land of freedom and its ivory
towers. Yet, there are few scholarly works that reveal the current daily academic and
social conditions of these women who live in the margins.
I spent eight years doing ethnographic fieldwork with over 40 Chinese
women scientists and engineers in the U.S. I conducted oral history interviews,
had informal conversations, participated in group activities, and socialized with
Chinese women, men, and other international scientists and engineers. More
importantly, as an immigrant Chinese woman scholar, these experiences enabled
me to constantly reflect on many facets of migration and how it impacts individual
women’s experiences interacting and collaborating with friends and colleagues
transnationally. It made me realize that there is no one definition of being a
Chinese woman. All of their experiences are defined, shaped, and reshaped by their
ethnicity, subcultural backgrounds, K-12 and undergraduate educational experiences,
family backgrounds, and even geographical origin in China.
One of the reasons I became an ethnographer is that I have always had a keen
eye for observing cultural differences and the meaning behind people’s interactions
and conversations. As an educator and a feminist scholar, I have spent much time
investigating educational experiences and gender equality for women students,
faculty, and professionals. The unique cultural lenses I apply to my research and
my family background resulted in my interests and enthusiastic pursuit of gaining
greater understanding of Chinese women’s experiences, their struggles, and their
strategies, and more importantly, what we can do collectively to help them (us) take
fewer detours, struggle less, and proactively pursue their (our) dreams.
After being repeatedly put on the spot by a professor in graduate school to speak on
behalf of the 1.26 billion Chinese people regarding the one-child policy, the internet
censorship, and the human rights issues, I became angry and realized that I could no
longer put up with the level of ignorance and discrimination in American academia
towards immigrant scholars. Many Chinese women scientists and engineers I knew
had experienced very similar incidents, but most of them have chosen to swallow the
pain and let time heal the scars.
Nearly all of the Chinese women I studied have been hurt by the negative
stereotype of Chinese women as submissive and from being treated that way by

xx
 PROLOGUE

their male colleagues, advisers, or collaborators. Many of us struggle with finding

academic independence from our assigned advisers, finding the right answers when
we are being questioned over some controversial issues about China, and being
called the “fresh-off-the-boat docile Chinese girls.” These stereotypes need to stop,
and all of my personal experience in American academia and my family background
have provided endless motivation for me to provide a more accurate understanding
of Chinese women in the U.S.
While various scholars have made significant contributions to the studies of
women’s careers in higher education, especially in science and engineering fields,
three complex yet interrelated areas remain understudied and are the focus of this
book. First is the current status of foreign-born women scientists’ and engineers’
educational experience and career progression in the U.S. Second is the influence of
transnational networks on foreign-born women’s career choices and advancement,
as well as the countervailing influence of these women on the growth of these
networks. Third is the intersectionality of gender, science and engineering culture,
and national cultures. My doctoral dissertation, The Influence of Protégé-Mentor
Relationships and Social Networks on Women Doctoral Students’ Academic Career
Aspirations in Physical Science and Engineering, analyzed the data I acquired in a
formal academic manner. But it really did not describe the stories of these women,
or allow me to make a deeper examination of these issues or the underlying reasons
that these women were struggling so hard. So, with much pain, anger, and continued
hope, I decided to supplement my dissertation and research data with the additional
accounts and analyses in this book.
I want to dedicate this study to the many Chinese women in my family and
beyond who have suffered, struggled, survived, and thrived in the science and
engineering disciplines on the increasingly global stage. More importantly, I want
to dedicate this book to the many women, not just Chinese, who have abandoned
their careers in science and engineering due to severe discrimination, cultural
stereotypes, and family pressure. These fields are overwhelmingly male, and there
continues to be a great deal of resistance to women entering and succeeding in
them. Gender inequality persists in both China and the U.S., but Chinese women
scientists and engineers continue to stay motivated to pursue their dreams. As
one of the many immigrant Chinese women who are working in the U.S., I am
constantly struggling with balancing the new identity and old identity, the new
and home culture, the gender inequality in both the U.S. and China, and both my
Chinese and American dreams.

xxi
 SECTION I
THE LIVED EXPERIENCES OF CHINESE WOMEN
SCIENTISTS AND ENGINEERS
 CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION
Chinese Dreams, American Dreams

This is an account of the experiences of a group of Chinese women scientists

and engineers in pursuit of their personal and professional goals in the U.S.
What deserves our attention is their dedication to overcoming the obstacles they
face from being caught in between the two worlds: The U.S. vs. the Chinese, the
sciences vs. the humanities, feminist aspirations vs. male domination, American
culture vs. Chinese tradition, immigration vs. discrimination. Examining these
Chinese women’s experiences, struggles, strategies, and unique views can
enable young women considering careers in the sciences and engineering to find
encouragement and guidance as well as improve insights for institutions and
professors who work with Chinese women scientists and engineers.
This study takes a fresh look at the current status of these women and these
international developments, with a special emphasis on Chinese-born women, who
are increasingly present in U.S. science and engineering higher education. Their
lived  experiences and reflections can tell us a great deal about the emergence of
China  as a scientific and technological leader. The creative strategies that these
Chinese women utilize to establish their transnational networks help them to
survive in the U.S. and advance their careers. They face many challenges. The male-
dominated traditions and cultural norms in China make it very difficult to realize
their Chinese dreams for those who return. And most of those who choose to stay in
the U.S. face severe discrimination due to their cultural heritage, immigration status,
and limited resources. These limitations make fulfilling their American dream very
difficult.
Every researcher is driven by motivations that are personal to the researcher her/
himself. My motivation to write this book is driven by recognition of the values of
the four generations of Chinese feminists and women scientists in my family. My
great-grandmother was a poverty-stricken widow who moved to urban Mongolia
in the early 1900s. My grandmother, a engineer, was beaten and deprived of
dreams, career, dignity, and freedom during the Cultural Revolution. My mother is
a computer science professor who broke free of male domination and became part
of the first wave of female professors in Chinese engineering schools, and one of the
first women deans. My own family’s history is a reflection of generations of Chinese
women’s struggles and successes living in the margin of male domination.
Statistics about Chinese women in either science and engineering programs
or in the workforce are rarely recorded as a category. The very few times when

3
CHAPTER 1

numbers are recorded, their voices are united as a homogeneous “Chinese Voice.”
Their behaviors, interactions, social connections, educational experiences, career
development, and strategies seem to be explained by one word – “Chineseness.”
Stereotypes portrayed by popular media, Hollywood movies, and rumors about how
Chinese women should look, behave, listen, attend school, love, and interact are
poisoning scholars and popular views of Chinese women.
Another phenomenon that many scholars do not realize is that there are
unique gender and class hierarchies within the Chinese scientists’ and engineers’
communities. There is no single “Chinese” experience when it comes to women’s
experience in U.S. science and engineering fields. While there are commonalities,
Chinese women’s experiences are socially constructed and deeply influenced by
the intersection of race, nationality, ethnic backgrounds in China, socioeconomic
status, and their pre-U.S. educational experiences, especially their undergraduate
experiences in China. These factors not only impact their initial academic experiences
in the U.S. but also affect these women’s long-term career success and transnational
collaborations.
China is a large country with many different regions, ethnic groups, and
subcultures. Geographic location is a major factor influencing Chinese women’s
experience in the U.S. We cannot assume that a Chinese woman scientist from
Shanghai will have same experiences as a woman from a rural underdeveloped area.
Among other factors, students who come from metropolitan areas are more likely
to demonstrate better English language skills and have more financial support from
their families.
The undergraduate institutions of the vast majority of Chinese immigrant
scientists and engineers are likely to be one of the top five universities specializing
in physical sciences and engineering. They then come to the U.S. to do graduate
work in science and engineering. However, unfamiliarity with student-focused
teaching in U.S. graduate programs causes initial culture shock among many
Chinese women, who have experience in professor-focused teaching in China.
The Chinese Confucian tradition of respecting and even idolizing teachers
prohibits many Chinese immigrant graduate students from asking questions and
challenging hypotheses. The idolization of teachers and professors often results
in Chinese women being taken advantage of by their American professors. This
usually takes the form of working overtime without being given credit, having
their work stolen by their American professors, being marginalized in classrooms
and research collaborations, and even in some cases, enduring sexual harassment.
The stereotype of docility portrayed by the mass media and Hollywood movies
contributes to expectations that Chinese women will meekly do as they are told
and not object if they are taken advantage of. Many Chinese women in the U.S.
face constant pressure from these disturbing stereotypes and false interpretations
of their respectful manner towards others.
According to the women in the community, this perception of “Chineseness”
and the resulting struggles has three causes. First, the mass media portrays Chinese

4
 Introduction

women or Asian women in general as the ruo zhe (弱者), or victims, who require
male care and attention; second, they are seen by their non-Asian and Asian male
colleagues as shun cong (顺从), or obedient and docile, and this brings them endless
instructions and potential sexual harassment challenges; third, the philosophy of
Chinese Confucian-based culture renders women as the “lower class.” I am not
referring to “class” in the Marxist sense; instead, this “class” represents gender as a
“class”. In Confucian philosophy, the term nanzun nübei (男尊女卑), or women are
inferior to men, reflects this gender-based class. The literal translation of this term is
“men are respectful and women are inferior.” This is a notorious sexist philosophy,
with roots in Confucian philosophy, which also represents attitudes toward women
throughout the world. Many of the Chinese women scientists and engineers also
experienced similar examples of such a gender hierarchy during their careers in the
U.S., a country that allegedly represents freedom and equality.
After nearly a decade of conducting fieldwork with Chinese women scientists
and  engineers in the U.S., I have seen little mobility from the margins to the
mainstream U.S. science and engineering community. A handful of Chinese-born
women scientists have effectively assimilated and become successful through
tremendous amounts of work. But the vast majority of Chinese women are still
living in the margins. They receive minimal support from their doctoral programs
when they first arrive, and receive very little, if any, support from their families in
China since they live so far away from home, a problem that becomes worse if they
have children. They mostly interact only with their Chinese colleagues in the U.S.
They constantly face challenges from their male colleagues and occasionally are
sexually harassed by their fellow researchers, colleagues, or even advisers. They
nearly always are relegated to playing peripheral roles on research teams and in
laboratories, often shouldering the heavier yet less technical sides of projects while
their American colleagues claim the credit, often blatantly presenting the women’s
work as their own. Finally, they are usually considered ineligible for promotions
and instead tend to move laterally from position to position. All of these factors
create circumstances that make it very difficult for them to acquire funding, both as
students and later as professional researchers.
The limited space in this book allows me to only highlight the most prevalent
themes I observed through my fieldwork. However, despite all of the obstacles, these
women have learned to survive and thrive in the margins, they have developed coping
strategies, and they have worked to unite different communities of Chinese and
international women scientists and engineers. They have learned to be resourceful
and to not take anything for granted. These aspects have somehow earned them
great reputations in their sub-disciplinary science communities, yet they are rarely if
ever recognized or promoted to the levels they would have been if they were White
Europeans or Americans (male or female), or even their male Chinese and other
Asian colleagues. Many of the stories and challenges shared by the Chinese women
in this study are also seen among other immigrant women scientists’ and engineers’
communities. While being mindful of the cultural differences, no doubt some

5
CHAPTER 1

commonalities, strategies, and challenges are experienced across all international

women in the U.S. science and engineering fields.

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

The road leading to Chinese women’s access to higher education has been filled
with fights and struggles, especially a long struggle for unimaginable goals. In
contemporary China, women were not allowed to attend any school until the women’s
liberation movement began in the 1920s. In this era, the May Fourth Movement was
mainly led by young students, initially over Chinese territorial sovereignty. The
momentum of fighting for freedom and rights soon triggered the beginning of the
women’s liberation movement in China. After rounds of protests and negotiation,
Peking University became the first university to enroll women students.
After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, there was a
major expansion of the educational system, a great increase in the number of schools
and universities, and a significant increase in literacy rates for both men and women,
as well as greater access to higher education. However, the frequent turmoil of the
Cultural Revolution caused enormous damage to the Chinese educational system at
all levels, with most institutions of higher learning being either shut down or reduced
in size. During those turbulent years in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Chinese higher
education institutions did not admit any students based on merit; instead women
and men of “revolutionary” and “farmer” family backgrounds were nominated by
their local governments to attend universities. Many academics, scholars, scientists,
and engineers were condemned as members of the “bourgeois” class and labeled
“enemies” of the Communist Party. Many of them were imprisoned, physically and
mentally abused, and even executed. Many intellectuals were sent to rural areas
to labor camps. Universities only taught a curriculum that could help promote the
communist philosophy and advance the country’s industrial productivity. The entire
higher education system was destroyed and very few graduates left their schools
with useful skills.
The Chinese educational system was not fully restored until the late 1970s, after
the end of the Cultural Revolution. At that time, and generally as soon as they were
able to do so, many persecuted Chinese scholars left for Europe and North America.
This was a milestone for previously closed-off China and resulted in its first wave
of intellectual migration. Many of those who migrated were in the science and
engineering fields and many of them were women.
Migration scholars categorize highly educated, immigrant scientists and engineers
as huayi (华裔).1 Unlike other historically categorized migration types, the women
I studied were not forcefully removed from their birthplaces through pilgrimages,
business, family moves, and/or capitalist/colonial forces. Nearly all of them
voluntarily went overseas, alone, for the pursuit of further education. Many of them
became aware of the importance of academic freedom only after they had their first
taste of it upon arrival in the U.S. In many cases, they have outdone their male

6
 Introduction

counterparts in creating and maintaining transnational social networks and have

become the vanguards of new global networks in science and engineering.
Another big wave of Chinese scientific and engineering migration to the U.S.
began during the early 1990s when increasing affluence resulted in a dramatic
expansion in Chinese students’ enrollment in American universities. The number
of Chinese-born U.S. students has kept going up since then, regardless of the rising
costs of attending U.S. universities. It is seen as a very wise investment. The majority
are male, but women have been participating in ever-increasing numbers as well.
Many of the senior Chinese women scientists and engineers speak about China’s
incredible transformation during the past 30 years, as it has grown from being an
economically weak and politically isolated nation to the world’s largest economy and
an emerging global power in scientific research and innovation. This transformation
has certainly brought about benefits and increasing opportunity to all Chinese,
including the science and engineering communities, both at home and abroad, and
had led to many transnational collaborative opportunities.
Inside China there has recently been significantly more funding from the Chinese
government to promote the return of overseas-educated scientists. These initiatives
are mostly carried out through top-ranked Chinese universities. The incentives
being offered include competitive pay, attractive relocation packages, managerial
roles, start-up research funding, and laboratory establishment funds. In addition to
government efforts, there has also been a considerable increase in investment from
private sources.
The Chinese-born-and-raised yet overseas-educated talents who decide to return
to China to further their careers are usually referred to as haigui (海归). Haigui
is a pun that means “returning from the sea (海归),” and is pronounced like the
name of the animal “sea turtles (海龟).” “Sea turtles” have far-reaching and deep
influence in Sino-U.S. scientific collaborations and technology competitions and
transfer. However, none of the Chinese women scientists and engineers in this study
have so far expressed interest in returning to China. They cite gender inequality, the
sexist culture, the societal scrutiny and bias against highly educated women, as well
as the lack of academic freedom as the top reasons why they choose to stay in the
U.S., despite the myriad challenges that they are facing in their career development
process in the U.S. Chinese women are refusing to become science and engineering
“sea turtles.”
Many problems remain for the women scientists and engineers who choose to
pursue their careers in the U.S. A women scientist in her late 50s recalled the first
year after she arrived in her doctoral program in the midwestern part of the U.S.
nearly 30 years ago:
None of my fellow students had worked with a person from China before.
So they would ask me weird questions like “Do you eat dogs? We don’t want
you to eat our dogs” or “How did you escape from communist China?” Senior
male advisers would touch my hair in the laboratories and tell me I looked

7
CHAPTER 1

cute. I didn’t know what that meant back then but realized that it was sexual
harassment later on!
This Chinese woman’s experience was not unique. Sadly these kinds of incidents
still occur among a younger generation of Chinese women in today’s U.S. graduate
programs and workplaces.
Nearly all Chinese women doctoral students or those starting their first jobs have
experienced sexual harassment. Even though their awareness level of it has been
increased, like most women, they still rarely report these incidents to authorities.
Their concerns fall into two main categories: Their complaint may lead them to be
denied opportunities to be promoted or their visa sponsorship might be dropped,
forcing them to leave the U.S.; or others will gossip about what they must have done
to attract such “wrong” attention. Often, when sexual harassment incidents happen,
the Chinese women are seen as the ones to blame, a situation common with women
everywhere.
These women rarely sought out any psychological assistance to overcome
these challenges. No resources were made available to them. The only “defense
mechanism” that I observed was in the community of Chinese women scientists and
engineers in one particular program, who kept a record of all the ‘sexual harassers’
in the organization. The more senior women would warn the newcomers about who
they should stay away from.
Despite the challenges that Chinese immigrant scientists and engineers face in
both the U.S. and in China, many of them are playing crucial roles in fostering
transnational collaborations, securing research funding, and promoting international
scholarly exchanges through their multi-dimensional transnational ties. In this
transnational space, new scientific knowledge is produced and new ways to
conceptualize scientific questions are formed.
Many of these transnational ties are formed, maintained, and cultivated by Chinese
women scientists through their educational journeys in both China and the U.S., as
well as their personal connections through conferences and jobs. The connections
they maintain are sometimes referred to as “meshworks”, as they are mostly informal.
These ties are rarely funding- or power-driven. Instead, they have been created and
maintained through these women over the course of two to three decades. They
play key roles in not only advancing these women’s careers, funding opportunities,
and transnational collaborations, but more importantly, they serve as crucial
resources when immigrant Chinese science and engineering women face challenges,
harassment, and roadblocks throughout their careers. These informal networks were
rarely discussed as a concept among the humble Chinese women scientists, and
they rarely spoke about strategically fostering these connections, regardless of the
deep impact these strategies were having on this community. Nevertheless, they are
significant and will be discussed in detail in this book.
In the Chinese cultural context, the special connections established based on
years of reciprocity and trustworthiness are called guanxi (关系). Guanxi are the

8
 Introduction

interpersonal connections of sentiments, kinships, obligations, and loyalty that

guide all types of social interactions and assist knowledge and favor exchanges in
China and also among the Chinese diaspora around the world. Guanxi networks
play critical roles in the context of Chinese scientists’ and engineers’ networks in the
U.S. This is demonstrated in helping newcomers to assimilate and adjust to the U.S.
science and engineering academic environment, foster collaborations, and assist
women in overcoming challenges and strategizing for their career advancement.
Chinese guanxi ties are cultivated through fictive kinships and demonstrate strong,
long-term personal interactions and gift exchanges.
Although many Chinese women are playing a key role in the science and
engineering guanxi networks, they are rarely the key players in these connections,
as they hold very few managerial positions and are rarely involved in the decision
making regarding funding, human resources, and collaborative projects. Yet, they are
crucial in maintaining these long-term and transnational ties through their personal
connections, mentoring activities, organization of social gatherings, provision of
leads for potential collaborative projects, etc. Many of the activities are strategically
thought out and passed down from one generation to another in the Chinese women
scientists’ and engineers’ community.

STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

The first section of this book begins with my own family story. It spans four
generations  of feminists and scholars and documents the struggles, hardships,
and strategies each generation encountered while living in the margins of their
professions. Through my personal and family experience, I realized the important
role that national culture, ethnicity, family background, geographic origin, and
socioeconomic status play in shaping Chinese women’s experience throughout their
educational and professional journey. This section then discusses the culture of
science itself, a field that is often seen as entirely objective and without subjectivity
or  prejudices. It is in fact deeply influenced by cultural, national, and gender
dynamics. Much literature on the history and current status of women scientists
from non-Euro-American countries is discussed in the later part of this section. The
discussion of these works sets a solid foundation for the study of the expansion and
exploration of Chinese women’s academic and professional experience in the U.S.
The second section zeros in on the academic profession and graduate education
in both China and the U.S. It starts with a review of key literature and the history of
women in American academia in general, and presents the special challenges they
are facing in academic science and engineering. The section then discusses Chinese
academia, its history and contemporary evolution, turmoil, and challenges. This
leads to an exploration of the nature and culture of American graduate education and
connects Chinese women scientists’ and engineers’ educational background in China
with their academic and professional experiences in the U.S. The section concludes
with an examination of postdoctoral work.

9
CHAPTER 1

The third section describes the lived experiences of Chinese immigrant

scientists and engineers in the U.S. It identifies three major threads for the entire
book: mentoring experiences, career paths, and tacit knowledge sharing through
the network of Chinese women scientists and engineers. Career, communications,
and discrimination challenges and stereotypes are investigated. In recent years the
opportunities for scientists and engineers in China have increased. The concept
of haigui (海归), or sea turtle, which refers to Chinese scientists and engineers
who return to China after studying and working in the U.S., is described and the
phenomenon is analyzed.
The fourth section is about the emergence of the various types and levels of
networks that Chinese women are part of, some exclusive to Chinese and/or to
women, and others built transnationally through their educational connections and
conference experiences. This section begins with a discussion of the guanxi ties
mentioned above – the uniquely Chinese yet powerful concept of transnational
interpersonal networks that are crucial to the fields of science and engineering.
It continues with an examination of meshworks, the communities of practice
that connect professionals within various fields, such as those emerging out of
alumni connections, and concludes with an examination of the nature and role of
transnational networks.
The role that gender plays in this complicated web of relationships, historical
developments, and social power is then explored. Many Chinese women interviewed
did not conceptualize their tactics of networks as intentional, yet their actions
demonstrated their strategies to use these guanxi networks to help them overcome
barriers, establish collaborations, advance their careers, and establish mentoring
relationships. These networks are vital in nearly all interviewed Chinese women
immigrant scientists’ lives, both professional and personal.
The final section discusses the possibility for future studies of Chinese women’s
lived experiences through the lens of Chinese feminism. It offers new theoretical
lenses on studying Chinese women’s lived experiences from such perspectives.
There is no right way or single way to study Chinese women scientists and engineers.
Instead, a Chinese woman’s experience can only be thoroughly understood after the
researcher learns about her social and economic status, the cultural and sub-social
backgrounds of the part of China she is from, her engagement level with international
scientists prior to moving to the U.S., and her family history in connection with the
science and engineering disciplines. Researchers must look at women scientists’ at
their full backgrounds before categorizing their challenges, struggles, or successes
as a common phenomenon.
The book concludes with some thoughts on the differences between Chinese
and American feminism and the concept of gender equality – and what lessons
can be drawn from this examination. The Chinese notion of promoting gender
equality is conceptualized as making men and women equal, meaning that women
should share half of the responsibilities, act the same way men do, and achieve
the same outcomes. The famous phrase “women hold up half the sky,” coined in

10
 Introduction

the Mao era, depicted the same expectations for all women. Through presenting the
women’s lived experiences studied in this project, I hope that scholars can rethink
and reconceptualize such a rigid interpretation of equality and move towards a more
culturally and disciplinarily suitable path of pursuing women’s advances. Many
countries have taken different approaches to conceptualizing equality as sameness
or as difference (equal worth). Europe institutionalized it by making women and
men equal. Americans view it more as achieving equal worth, e.g., equal pay, equal
worth, or culturally different but equivalent practices.
Studies of these issues need to take into consideration Chinese women’s viewpoints
and be aware of the fact that they are not a homogeneous group. Subcultures in any
given Chinese women’s scientist and engineer community should be acknowledged,
while studying them and their experiences should always be “localized.” This could
mean localization of their institutions, organizations, sub-disciplines, socioeconomic
backgrounds, ethnicities, and educational experiences.
My goal is to reveal the unique challenges that this group of women face, and to
propose key issues and foci for studying foreign-born scientists and their transitional
networks – and not just Chinese or even Asian women. The findings in this book will
provide valuable future directions for both quantitative and qualitative investigations
of the increasing numbers and influence of foreign-born scientists and engineers in
the U.S. and the intersectionality of science, culture, gender, class, and nationality.

NOTE
1
Jan Ryan, “Chinese Women as Transnational Migrants: Gender and Class in Global Migration
Narratives,” International Migration 40, no. 2 (2002): 93–116.

11
 CHAPTER 2

THE WOMEN I STUDIED AND

MY OWN FAMILY HISTORY

Contrary to what we may have been taught to think, unnecessary and unchosen
suffering wounds us but need not scar us for life. It does mark us. What we
allow the mark of our suffering to become is in our own hands.
 – bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
There is a personal story behind every social science research project. The birth
of this book and its related research were closely related to and inspired by my
family stories and the educational experiences I have had and continue to have in
the U.S. as a first-generation immigrant scholar. I am inspired by three generations
of independent, powerful, and courageous women in my family who did not give
in to the so-called “social traditions” and were able to establish their own niche in
a profoundly sexist professional and social environment. They observed, listened,
questioned, and acted. I then followed their path.

THE ALLEGED TRAITOR 所谓的叛徒

Chinese culture scrutinizes its own kind who study and write about its history
and current societal issues under a not-so-positive light. Many Chinese scholars
who were educated in Europe or North America have begun studying migration
and ethnic, racial, and sociological conditions in China. This group of scholars is
highly regarded in the U.S. and Europe, given their multiple positionalities, deep
transnational cultural and linguistic understandings, and genuine urge to explore
the understudied arenas of Chinese history and educational fields (at least for some
of us).
Yet, some Chinese scholars in China are skeptical about the intent of these
scholars. Many new negative terms have been invented by scholars in China to
reflect this level of skepticism or even hostility towards Chinese-born yet U.S.-
or European-educated Chinese scholars. For example, they are referred to as the
du guo jin de jia yang guizi (镀过金的假洋鬼子), or gold gilded fake western
enemy. Another term that is widely used is xinshiji pantu (新世纪叛徒), or new
century traitor. These names are no doubt derogatory. But it is not fair to assume
all Chinese-born scholars who study China are traitors. Somewhat ironically, I have
referred to this section about my experience as “the alleged traitor” to reflect this
personal view.

13
CHAPTER 2

THE CHINESE WOMEN SCIENTISTS AND ENGINEERS I STUDIED

The content of this book is mainly based on my ethnographic work and interviews
with approximately 40 Chinese women scientists and engineers, which became
the basis of my doctoral dissertation. I first began doing my fieldwork in 2008 in
Southern California; then the research participants snowballed across the U.S. as
I began meeting more and more Chinese women scientists and engineers through
their closely-knit networks. During the seven years of fieldwork, several rounds
of interviews, and countless informal conversations, many kind, open-minded,
intelligent, and powerful Chinese women scientists and engineers have shared their
experiences and inspired me to share them with others.
While it was my biggest wish to give acknowledgement to each woman I worked
so closely with, researchers’ ethics have stopped me from portraying these women
individually. Individual biographical sketches could certainly give this book more
life but I cannot compromise these women’s privacy by giving too many individual
details about them. As one of my advisory panel members (a sub-group of Chinese
women scientists I studied) pointed out, “You will compromise our identities and
ruin our careers if you do so.”
After a long period of debating, I decided to sketch a group biography so that my
readers could use their imagination while reading through this book. I encourage you
to imagine these women’s experiences, struggles, fears, joys, and strategies to live in
the margins through the quotes, the descriptions, and the stories told by these women.
The youngest Chinese woman scientist/engineer who contributed to this study
was 22 at the time of my first interview. The oldest was in her early 60s. This means
that this group of women was composed of millennials, who have not seen the
economic and political struggles that their parents’ generations have experienced,
as well as those who grew up in the Mao era, who experienced the Great Famine
and the infamous Cultural Revolution, who were accused of being “bourgeoisie
intellectuals,” and have subsequently experienced (and contributed to) the economic
reforms, China’s rapid globalization, and other advances.
These women were trained in a variety of physical sciences and engineering
sub-disciplines. These included geology, chemistry, space physics, oceanography,
mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, computer science, civil engineering,
theoretical physics, and astronomy.
All 40 of them were not only born in China but also received their bachelor’s
degrees there. Socioeconomically, over 30 of them came from families where at
least one of their parents did not attend college. This pattern was more prevalent for
the women who were over 45 years old. Nearly all of them attended one of the top
five science and engineering universities in China (which are Tsinghua University,
Peking University, Fudan University, University of Science and Technology of
China, and Zhejiang University). The vast majority of them then went to the top
20 graduate schools in their respective fields in the U.S. and 32 out of the 40 had
completed doctoral degrees in the U.S. Ethnically, most were the majority Han

14
 THE WOMEN I STUDIED AND MY OWN FAMILY HISTORY

Chinese, but 20 percent of them belonged to various Chinese ethnic minority groups.
The minority regions in China are mostly located in the south, west, and north, and
are economically disadvantaged compared to regions on the east coast of China,
which are mostly occupied by Han.1 Currently, college entrance examination scores
are the sole criteria for admission to higher education. The Chinese government
has established a policy of admitting certain ethnic minority students whose scores
on these exams may be lower than their peers in order to increase their rates of
enrollment. Geographically, 12 of the women came from larger metropolitan areas,
while 28 of them came from smaller prefecture-level or county-level cities.
Most top-ranked universities are concentrated in Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing,
and Tianjian. These four cities are centrally administered municipalities with
populations between 12 and 28 million. But most of the women I interacted with
were not from these four cities. They joked with me that people in big cities are
more affluent so they tend to push their children into disciplines that would allow
them to enjoy their lives more, e.g., the social sciences and humanities, or perhaps
law or medicine. They said these fields were completely out of their reach due to
the higher cost of attending these universities and fewer opportunities to obtain
scholarships to support their study. This leads to another key characteristic that all
40 women shared – only one of them had any significant financial support from her
family during her graduate studies in the U.S. Nearly all of them relied on financial
assistance from their institutions.

MY FAMILY HISTORY

In Chinese culture it is generally considered to be greatly disrespectful for someone to

dig up their own family history and share it with outsiders. It is considered a “betrayal”
of the entire family. Family trees and histories are meant for private use only, and
sharing the “dirty laundry” with the world would make someone qualify as a pan tu (
叛徒), or traitor. This belief may have changed over the years with the emergence of
several prominent autobiographic works from Chinese-American/European women
authors. Yet, writing one’s family history is still looked down upon in China.
I do not intend to share my family history for the purpose of making this book seem
more exotic, touching, or marketable. The reason I decided to share due to my firm
belief that this part of my family history is extremely relevant to the Chinese women
scientists’ and engineers’ lived experiences I studied. This study stems from my own
family’s experiences, going back to my great-grandmother, a strong woman who was
a firm believer in education for women at a time when education for women was
generally frowned on if not formally prohibited. My grandmother was an electrical
engineer in Inner Mongolia, and my mother is a computer science professor. Due to
space limitations, I am only going to highlight some aspects of my family’s history in
this book with the hope that it will be elaborated on in a later publication.
In the process of collecting the family history data, I was saddened by many
stories: by the desperate situation of my great-grandmother, who was a homemaker

15
CHAPTER 2

with bound feet, and who lost her husband at the age of 24, leaving her to raise
two daughters and a son without any steady income. She managed to survive in a
largely male-centric society and culture without a male in her household, and raised
two engineers in an extremely chaotic period of Chinese history (early 1920s to
1940s). I was also saddened by the life of my grandmother, one of the nation’s very
first women engineers and feminist leaders, who was wrongfully accused of being
“bourgeoisie” and “capitalist” during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, and put
under “office” arrest for over one year. She was physically and mentally abused and
prohibited from seeing her then very young children.

Three-Inch Golden Lilies 三寸金莲

My great-grandmother was born in the early 1900s into an affluent landlord family
in the rural area of Inner Mongolia. Her family owned many lands yet wanted her
to have a better life in the city. So, when she was 16, her father arranged a marriage
through a seasoned matchmaker who claimed to have many connections with their
“matching families” in the city.2 The day she got married was the first time she met
her husband, my great-grandfather. But it turned out that the matchmaker had lied
about the man’s age, family background, and even health conditions. She had married
into a penniless family with much debt due to her new husband’s lung disease.

Figure 1. Photograph of my great-grandmother, Xu Shi.

16
 THE WOMEN I STUDIED AND MY OWN FAMILY HISTORY

After eight years of battle with tuberculosis, her husband died, leaving behind
my great-grandmother with their three children, two older girls and a young boy.
Her second daughter was my grandmother. Neighbors looked down on her as her
household did not have a male breadwinner. Her husband’s family cut off ties with
her as they superstitiously believed that she had brought bad luck to the family and
that was why her husband passed away after they got married.
This was in the 1920s, when women in China were not able to enter any kind
of formal employment. Having to support three children, she took on sewing and
laundering work for wealthy families. This was during the era that was on the verge
of the first wave of women’s liberation, when feminist ideologies were spreading
from Japan through newly emerged feminist journals.
My great-grandmother suffered greatly from being illiterate, but deep down in her
heart she always believed in the power of education. She decided to send all three
of her children to school and to do so she sold all of the jewelry that had come as
part of her dowry. My grandmother had one brother, who was the youngest in the
family. My grandmother recalled that most families, rich and poor, would always
choose to send only their sons to schools. But my great-grandmother also believed
in educating her daughters, and scrimped to send them to school. My grandmother
recalled that when she was in the second grade her mother once ran out of money
and baked bread and made homemade jam and pickles to “bribe” the headmaster of
the school. My great-grandmother knelt in front of the headmaster’s office for an
entire day until he agreed to allow my grandmother back into her classes.

The Iron Girl 铁娘子

The silver lining of my great-grandfather passing away young was that my

grandmother did not have a father who would force her to get married when she was
13. Her older sister met a 40-year-old lieutenant in the Kuomintang when she was
16 and became his concubine the next year. My grandmother recalled that that was
when her sister cut all her ties with her family as my great-grandmother, despite her
poverty-stricken condition, did not think it was right for her oldest daughter to marry
someone who had more than one wife.
My grandmother had to work at rich local residents’ homes after school to clean
their dishes, take out the garbage, and wash their children’s laundry. She said her
family could not afford to pay for oil to use the lamp at night so she tried to finish
her homework while doing laundry for a wealthy family in order to keep up with her
schooling. By the time she completed elementary school, her hands were covered
by thick calluses and they cracked during the winter due to repetitive washing and
cleaning work after school.
After learning how to read and write during her primary school education, my
grandmother began to read the women’s movement journals that were beginning to
circulate from both Japan and major cities in China. She became committed to the
many causes promoted by the feminist journals, such as gender equality, women’s

17
CHAPTER 2

access to education, and opposition to arranged marriages. She told me that she
was close to her sister and that was why it hurt so much when her sister decided to
become the second wife of a military man who was 24 years her senior. They did not
speak for over three years because of this.
This situation changed when she saw her sister crying at their mother’s house one
day. After learning that her sister’s husband had hit her and her then infant child,
my grandmother stormed off to her sister’s house, argued with her Kuomintang
husband, and demanded he apologize. He did not respond; instead, he tried to hit
my grandmother, who then fought back. Up to this day, I still try to visualize how a
small woman like my grandmother could have so much courage and the strength to
stand up for her older sister. But I think everything becomes rather clear as the story
of my family unfolds.
Upon graduation from primary school, my grandmother was able to receive a
small stipend up front from a nearby power plant. The condition was that she had to
sign a contract to work as an apprentice in their electrical division for three years.
This meant that she had to work long hours there for very, very little compensation.
But in return, she got some money to cover her tuition for middle school and was
also able to learn electrical skills. My grandmother was 14 that first summer and
remained hungry every day. There was food given to the workers at the power plant,
but she saved as much as she could for her younger brother, who was going through
primary school at that point.3
However, this meant that my grandmother became more or less financially
independent and was able to help her mother. And somehow she also managed to
save up enough money to pay for the first year of tuition at an all women’s middle
school. My grandmother recalled that she was the poorest child who attended her
school. Her clothes were covered with patches, as her family did not have the money
to buy her new clothes. She was proud that as torn as her clothes might be, she
always cleaned them and always went to school with a pretty ponytail. After paying
for tuition, there was no money left for her to buy textbooks so she stayed longer
after school to hand copy other students’ textbooks. She said she made up for her
poor background by having great grades in math. Because of this, some girls from
wealthy families started to ask her to tutor them. My grandmother was then able to
have some free dinners at her wealthier classmates’ houses.
After a few years, she graduated from her school with the highest honors and
began working full-time as an electrician at the power plant where she had been
an apprentice. She became interested in a full-time position for three reasons:
first, her family needed the financial support to send her younger brother to a
good school; second, she had become deeply fascinated by the work in electrical
engineering (though she did not realize there was such a discipline back then); and
third, she had met many people at the plant who were joining the Communist Party
(this was during the 1940s), and she had become very interested in its ideology
of gender equality and freedom from the old Chinese traditions. She thought
that by continuing to work at the power plant she would have more opportunities

18
 THE WOMEN I STUDIED AND MY OWN FAMILY HISTORY

to  participate in the revolution and change the fates of future generations of
Chinese women.
Even after working full-time at the power plant, my grandmother was still
considered as an apprentice or tu di. She was the only woman on the electrician team.
She was verbally harassed by many men there on a regular basis and, in addition to her
regular work, had to do dishes and make tea for her shi fu (master, or in an apprentice
setting, as in this case, teacher). Essentially, she had to perform housekeeping duties
in order to learn electrical skills from her teachers and colleagues. Eventually, she
joined the Communist Party. She took on the responsibility of running the women’s
publications at the power plant and was elected to be the chairperson of the first
women’s committee.
During this time, she met several female comrades who had returned from studying
in Russia and Japan. They encouraged my grandmother to complete prep courses
for university education. Regular university was out of the question for financial
reasons, even if they were beginning to accept women. So she began participating
in a new form of higher education that was beginning to emerge: ye da (夜大). The
literal translation is “evening university.” They were in fact higher education degree
programs taught in the evenings for working professionals. It was similar to today’s
part-time degree programs or even online programs.
At this time, she met my grandfather through one of her engineering classes and
they started dating. This practice was extremely rare during my grandmother’s era

Figure 2. My grandmother, Xu Guizhen, speaking at a meeting of the Inner Mongolia

Chapter of the All-China Women’s Federation, the official women’s rights organization
established by the communist government in 1949. It was the official leader of the
Chinese women’s movement. The picture was taken at her inauguration speech
after her election as the president of the Inner Mongolia Chapter.

19
CHAPTER 2

and even looked down upon. Women and girls were “owned” by their fathers and
brothers until they were married off. Then the ownership changed, and their husbands
dictated their lives. I think in this sense, my grandmother was inspired by early
feminist teachings and felt empowered to challenge the old and sexist rules. They got
married a few years later and my grandfather became one of the greatest supporters of
my grandmother’s career and personal growth, even during the darkest times.
After several years of hard work, my grandmother received her degree in turbine
engineering. She became one out of only two women engineers in the entire Inner
Mongolia province. She worked extra hard, for long hours, and took on tasks that
her male colleagues did not want to take on. In the early 1960s, she was promoted to
the position of vice president of the Inner Mongolia Central Power Plant in Hohhot.4
She was the only woman engineer in a leadership position and thus was referred by
her colleagues as the “iron girl.”5
By 1965, she was responsible for overseeing electricity production and distribution
in the Inner Mongolian region. It was a tough job that required over 100 hours of
work per week and much traveling. My mother recalled that she and her brother
rarely saw my grandmother during weekdays. She spent most of her time in the
office and with her engineering teams.

Figure 3. My grandmother, sitting in the middle with other male engineers and Red Guards.
This was before the eruption of the Cultural Revolution. She was one of two
women engineers at a power plant with over 1,000 employees.

20
 THE WOMEN I STUDIED AND MY OWN FAMILY HISTORY

In late 1966, the Cultural Revolution began to unfold. Local governments started
different levels of purge campaigns to “purify” the Communist Party. In Mongolia,
where my family was, the Inner Mongolian Purge Campaign started in May
1967. The campaign aimed to identify and punish nei ren dang (内人党), or Inner
Mongolian Revolutionary Party members.6 The Inner Mongolian Revolutionary

Figure 4. A typical poster from the Cultural Revolution era. The red Chinese characters
translate as “thoroughly criticize the ‘theory of human nature’ of the landlord and
capitalist classes.” I remember seeing the original poster in my grandmother’s
house during my childhood. The image is from the IISH / Stefan R. Landsberger
Collections, retrieved from chineseposters.net with permission.

21
CHAPTER 2

Party was originally founded during the 1920s and dissolved in the late 1940s. It
was a political party in the Inner Mongolia region that advocated Mongolian self-
determination and socialism.
The purge campaign targeting nei ren dang removed and executed the so-called
“traitors” and “spies” among the Communist Party members in Inner Mongolia. Over
300,000 leaders in Inner Mongolia were wrongly accused of plotting to overthrow
the communist government, arrested, and physically tortured. Over 20,000 of them
were arbitrarily executed.7 Many of the dead were ethnic Mongolians.
Under that kind of political climate my grandmother, the only woman engineering
leader in the area, stuck out like a sore thumb. In June 1967, she started another day
early at 6 a.m., but an hour and a half later a group of police came into her office and
placed her under “office arrest.” After not hearing from her for one day, my anxious
grandfather and great-grandmother learned from the local communist radio that my
grandmother, the “iron girl,” was now considered a “spy for the capitalists.”
All family friends cut off their ties with my grandmother’s family and the entire
family was cut off from any kind of communication with her. She was placed under
“office arrest” for over one year, without any solid evidence that she was a “capitalist
spy” and a criminal. During the 14 months she was kept as a prisoner in her own
office, which served as her jail cell, she was repeatedly interrogated, tortured, and
physically abused.
My mother has told me she still has nightmares about when she saw her mother
for the first time after seven months of separation. At the time, my mother was 13
and her brother was 3 years old. When they went to visit my grandmother they
were searched and spat on by the Red Guards before they were allowed to see their
mother in her office. My grandmother was covered in blood, had lost approximately
40 pounds, and was living under animal-like conditions. My mother and her brother
faced extreme discrimination in school due to their status as the children of a
“communist traitor.”
In late 1968, my grandmother was released but was then sent to a labor camp in
the rural region of Inner Mongolia for laodong gaizao (劳动改造) or laogai (劳改),
which means transformation through labor. It was widely used in the Chinese criminal
justice system as a way to punish political criminals. Many people were wrongly
placed in laogai camps during the Cultural Revolution. The camps’ conditions were
horrific. Many people died due to extremely hard labor, starvation, and dehydration.
I have collected a few journals left by my grandmother during her two years of office
arrest and in the laogai camp. They will be included in a future book.
In late 1970s, with the end of the Cultural Revolution, the Communist Party
started large-scale political rehabilitation, ping fan (平反). It released many political
leaders who had been wrongly accused and fallen into disgrace during the Cultural
Revolution. One of the most prominent ones was Deng Xiaoping, who became
leader of China and who changed China forever through his Open Door policy.

22
 THE WOMEN I STUDIED AND MY OWN FAMILY HISTORY

Figure 5. The Chairman Mao button that my grandmother used to wear on her work
jacket every day. This button was on my grandmother’s jacket when she was
wrongfully accused, imprisoned, and beaten by the Red Guards during the
Cultural Revolution. It was covered in blood when retrieved.

Around the same time, my grandmother was rehabilitated and the Inner Mongolian
Communist Party formally apologized for the nearly five years of false accusations
and physical and mental abuse. She was re-hired as the vice president of the Inner
Mongolian power plant, except that this time around, in addition to her engineering
job, she became the chairperson of the Women’s Federation in Inner Mongolia.

23
CHAPTER 2

Figure 6. An award certificate in both Mandarin Chinese and Mongolian for my

grandmother, issued by the Inner Mongolia Women’s Federation. The text translates as
“To Comrade Xu Guizhen: In recognition of your outstanding performance during
the Inner Mongolian Provincial Women’s Career Advancement and Learning
Competition, you are awarded as the female zhuangyuan.”8

The Super Woman 女强人

My mother’s generation was regarded as the “lost generation of China.” They

lived through the Great Chinese Famine (1958–1961) and the Cultural Revolution
(1966–1976), and suffered heavily from the direct consequences. Just at the time my
mother was getting ready to apply to universities, the Cultural Revolution started,
with devastating effects on education at all levels. All secondary and postsecondary
schools were closed, so instead of going to school most young people started joining
the Red Guards. They despised college students, who were sent to the countryside
to be “reformed through labor.” It was a dark time for anyone who had skills or
knowledge greater than common people, especially scientists, engineers, and
university professors, who were made the target of “political struggle” in some
way. Some intellectuals were sent to rural areas, some were publicly denounced and
humiliated, and some were ambiguously persecuted in a myriad of other ways, as
with my grandmother, whose office became her prison cell.
My mother was heartbroken when she found out that the university she had
always planned to attend had been closed. Yet its affiliated factory remained open,
as it needed to provide material to support the development of the new socialist
country. Luckily, she was able to find a job there as an apprentice electrician.

24
 THE WOMEN I STUDIED AND MY OWN FAMILY HISTORY

At this time, my mother’s high school science teacher was arrested due to the
fact that he had previously studied in France. That experience alone made him part
of the “capitalist class.” My mother saw him for the last time in the spring before
all schools across China were shut down. She particularly remembered that Mr. Lin
told her to remain optimistic, continue to self-study, and pursue a career in university
teaching. A few months later, my mother heard that Mr. Lin’s home had been raided
by the Red Guards. One month after that, he was sent to a labor camp in a remote
area in China’s northwestern region. My mother never heard from him again. Yet,
Mr. Lin’s encouragement stayed with her, and doing what he had encouraged her to
do became her highest priority.
Every day, after her work at the factory, my mother would find some quiet time
to study the rest of the high school curriculum and read university textbooks related
to electrical engineering. Her earliest exposure to engineering had been through my
grandmother’s work. Then she realized from her teacher’s experience that rather
than being an engineer, she wanted to become a professor/teacher one day in order
to change the way people saw engineering practice, and in particular, the way they
viewed women engineers.
It was very risky to keep books during the Cultural Revolution era. My mother
hand-copied many books and hid them underneath the brick flooring in my great-
grandmother’s house. At night, after everyone went to bed, it would be my mother’s
private studying time. She kept up with her self-studying for nearly 10 years, until
the end of the Cultural Revolution and the Chinese government reopened all of
the higher education institutions and resumed university entrance exams. By then,
however, many people of my mother’s age had been scattered around the country:
some moved to rural areas to build the socialist society; some had joined the Red
Guards and then vanished to different places; some found factory jobs and started
families; and some fled China entirely.
Despite the challenges of the times, my mother was determined to pursue her
graduate education in engineering. She recalled that most of her classmates in
graduate school were male students, on average of 15 years her junior. She persevered
and eventually became a professor of electrical engineering. The many negative
experiences that she had on her educational journey prompted her to teach in a
university setting and to influence the way engineering education was conducted.
During the late 1970s, computer technology first started to enter China. My
mother’s research team was fortunate to be included in building one of the first
groups of computer labs in China. She was young, excited, and full of ambition. She
got to travel extensively through her projects and eventually landed a position at a
research university’s newly established computer science department.
Being a young female professor in the school of engineering was challenging,
especially in the years immediately after the Cultural Revolution, when schools and
universities were reopening and rebuilding after years of neglect. I was born during
the first five years on her job. She said it was the most challenging period in her
career. She had to suffer from three kinds of harsh discrimination: first, she was a

25
CHAPTER 2

female in a mostly male-dominated field; second, she was young compared to other
professors in the field; and third, she had become a mother, which was considered a
negative trait for academic scientists and engineers. She was challenged, questioned,
and made the object of jokes on a daily basis.
During the late 1980s, my mother was able to start attending many national
and even international conferences. She met many like-minded women engineers.
Through the network of scholars she was able to bring an increasing amount of
research funding to her university. With more abundant research funding, she also
began organizing committees to publish books, submit publications to high-ranked
peer reviewed journals, and collaborate with peer institutions. This was when things
turned around: her male colleagues began to treat her better (although still not as an
equal), but they also became envious of her academic achievements. They began to
call her “the female man” in the department. Many women engineering students that
my mother mentored gave her the name “super woman professor.”
In the early 2000s, she was named dean of the school of engineering at her
university. One of the top priorities right after she assumed the position was to
establish an engineering education department and to start a series of courses on
gender and engineering. This plan was met with great opposition and challenges.
Older male engineering professors called her the “unserious woman in the
department who wants to retire in education.” They wrote letters to the president of
the university in order to sabotage the effort. But she succeeded, and two years later,
after many debates, sleepless nights, and challenges, the department of engineering
education officially began to enroll students.
The field of science and engineering education has become an emerging discipline
in China and has attracted interdisciplinary researchers from engineering, physical
sciences, education, and sociology who are working together to conduct collaborative
research. As of the date of this book, my mother has over 100 publications and 25
books on the subjects of computer networks, software engineering, and engineering
education. She visited me in Los Angles just as I was completing the last chapters
of this book and she has just started another book project with her research team!

NOTES
1
Ethnic minorities in China refer to the non-Han Chinese population. The People’s Republic of China
(PRC) officially recognizes 55 minority groups within China in addition to the Han majority. As of
2010, the combined population of officially recognized minority groups made up 8.49 percent of the
population of mainland China.
2
Traditional Chinese marriage traditions concern two families’ businesses. Thus, the traditional practice
is to find someone with more or less the same family background (in terms of socioeconomic status,
culture, dialect, ethnic groups, etc.). This tradition is described by Men Dang Hu Dui or 门当户对. It
is literally translated as “the families’ gates must match,” as the gates of an ancient Chinese household
usually reflected the family’s social status.
3
Work places during that era usually provided simple lunch at a communal cafeteria for their employees.
Each person only got one piece of bread and some soup for lunch every day. My grandmother saved
her portion of food from lunch to feed her brother.

26
 THE WOMEN I STUDIED AND MY OWN FAMILY HISTORY

4
Hohhot (呼和浩特) is the capital city of the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region in northern China,
serving as the region’s administrative, economic, and cultural center.
5
This term was popularized by the “Iron Girl” campaign during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976).
This campaign capitalized on the increasing participation of women in traditionally male occupations
since the 1950s in China and was intended to promote gender equality in all professions. See Lixian
Jin and Martin Cortazzi, “Changing Practices in Chinese Cultures of Learning,” Language, Culture
and Curriculum 19, no. 1 (2006): 5–20.
6
It is “内人党” in Chinese.
7
See Wikipedia page on the “Purge Campaign of Inner Mongolian Revolution Party” in Chinese. Note
that there is no English version available and that very little information on this subject is available
in English. This is an important chapter of Chinese history and ethnic minority relations that is nearly
always missing from any history research and books. Also see the “Inner Mongolian People’s Party”
article on Wikipedia.
8
In the ancient Imperial Examination system for selecting talent for government leadership positions
(206 B.C.E. to 1905), Zhuangyuan was the title for the person who ranked the first place; this title
would win him a very significant government leadership position plus high prestige and wealth.
Although this system was abolished during the early twentieth century, key terminologies such as
zhuangyuan are still widely used to refer to culturally significant positions and/or events. During the
Imperial Era, the title was exclusively for males.

27
 CHAPTER 3

INTERSECTIONALITY AND
THE CULTURE OF SCIENCE

This chapter focuses on operationalizing the concept of “science and engineering

culture” in the broader context of national cultures, in this case Chinese, and
identifying the influences of national cultures on the transformation of science and
engineering professions. Gender plays a key role that intersects with both national
and science and engineering culture, yet it has been largely overlooked. Discussions
in this chapter will shed light on how gender, nationality, class, and other issues
interact with science and engineering culture. I provide an in-depth description and
analysis on Chinese-born women scientists’ and engineers’ educational experiences,
and the influence of national culture and transnational networks on these women’s
career progression in the United States.
Even though the influence of disciplinary, institutional, racial/ethnic and national
cultures is critical to women’s educational experiences and career outcomes in
science and engineering, there have been very few comprehensive accounts of foreign
women scientists’ lived experiences, career barriers, and strategies to survive and
thrive within academia. Neelam Kumar’s groundbreaking work provides insightful
analyses of Indian women academics’ current status in Indian science under the
influence of India’s various cultural, societal, and political powers.1 This work has
been extremely valuable in shaping the design of my project as it investigates and
explores Indian women scientists’ lived experiences through a postcolonial feminist
lens. Unlike it, however, my book investigates important aspects of foreign-born
women’s lives in the U.S. academic science and engineering context, adding the
dimension of trying to succeed in a foreign culture.
Rosser’s book on women scientists’ challenges in academia analyzed the difference
between disciplinary and institutional cultures in shaping and transforming career
trajectories.2 Scantlebury, Kahle, and Martin utilized autobiographic and ethnographic
methods to document the lived experiences of women scientists’ and engineers’ career
trajectories. They then investigated the influence of gender stereotypes, and cultural
and racial factors, as well as work life balance, on this common career transitional
pattern in many academic science and engineering settings.3
Li and Beckett argued for a stronger framework of intersectionality when it comes
to examining Asian women faculty in U.S. higher education.4 This new framework
should provide concrete analyses of the importance of intersecting languages,
culture, academic discourse, gender, class, generation, and race in the American
higher education system. This book proposes a similar framework, but for the first

29
CHAPTER 3

time focusing on foreign-born women in the fields of science and engineering. This
book answers Li and Beckett’s call for stronger attention to intersectionality when it
comes to studying Asian women in the U.S. by proposing a new framework based
on both Chinese and American feminist perspectives. Given the enormous role that
the Chinese are playing in today’s world, if for no other reason than the size of the
population, the focus on Chinese-born women is essential and invaluable.

THE INTERSECTIONALITY OF GENDER WITH RACE, NATIONALITY,

AND SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS

This book looks at these issues from an ethnographic perspective. Ethnographic

studies can help to develop complex understandings of the meaning-making
processes that Chinese women go through in making decisions, based on their
educational experiences related to future career development. For example, what
kinds of considerations do these women make as part of the decision-making process
regarding pursuing an academic career? Only by studying people in their natural
settings, with a focus on their lived experiences, can we employ data collection tools
flexible enough to examine such complex and changing aspects of their educational
and professional experiences.
Foreign-born women scientists and engineers, not just Chinese ones, are nearly
invisible in American academia. Throughout this study I have been hampered by
the lack of data available on these women. One of the major reasons is that, while
foreign-born scientists occupy a relatively high percentage of academic positions
in science and engineering, “gender” has not been segregated as a category in any
foreign-born scientist dataset.5 In 2008, NSF data showed that Asians and Pacific
Islanders represented 50 percent of the foreign-born faculty employed full-time in
the United States and 62 percent of the foreign-born doctorate holders with postdoc
appointments. An average 25 percent of all American faculty and an impressive
46  percent in engineering were foreign-born. Among the 40,000 Asian/Pacific
Islander doctorate holders employed in U.S. academia, 44 percent were naturalized
U.S. citizens and 47 percent were noncitizens.6 But we do not know the percentages
of women within the figures.
In addition, a large number of foreign-born women scientists and engineers work
in part-time positions, such as adjunct faculty or postdoc positions. This makes
it additionally difficult to collect reliable statistical data to document women’s
career progressions upon graduation. Due to the lack of data on foreign-born
women scientists and engineers, it is difficult to assess how foreign-born women
faculty’s career development has been affected by their racial, ethnic, and national
backgrounds.
Traweek suggested that gender is socially constructed and that its intersection
with race, nationality and socioeconomic status all affect the role it plays in a
given community.7 In the Chinese women science and engineering community,
although gender is a controlled variable, it intersects with socioeconomic status,

30
 INTERSECTIONALITY AND THE CULTURE OF SCIENCE

their subculture within the Chinese context, and their experiences in undergraduate
institutions in China, all of which collectively influences the experiences each
Chinese woman scientist or engineer has in the U.S. These factors not only impact
their first few years of academic studies in the U.S., but also these women’s long-term
career success. A Chinese woman engineer who came from a family of engineers
would have completely different experiences compared to another Chinese woman
engineer who did not have this background; a woman scientist from Beijing could
have very different experiences compared to her counterpart from a small village
in the western part of China. Chinese scientists and engineers have their own
gender and class hierarchies within the community, reflecting considerably different
geographic, family, socioeconomic, and subcultural backgrounds. The women I met
reflected the many differences in today’s China, which after all is an extremely large
country with many different geographic regions, ethnic groups, and subcultures. Due
to the imbalanced economic development in China, the eastern region has become
significantly more developed than the western regions, and students who come from
metropolitan areas are more likely to have better language skills and more financial
support from their families.
My observations indicated that the more outspoken women in the group were
mostly likely to be from one of the big cities in China. And the few women who
constantly discussed feminist ideas within the engineer fields were most likely to
have a family tradition of highly educated women.
The few feminists in the group I studied constantly asked me questions about
my thoughts on Euro-American feminist theories and how they could be applied to
Chinese women in the U.S. I have had countless conversations with them about their
views of being a Chinese woman in science and engineering professions in the U.S.
They have enlightened me through their globally enriched thoughts. In one instance,
one woman challenged me: “Why would you think that we are all the same? We
certainly have common experiences as Chinese women but we have very different
experiences too! I think one’s geographic affiliation in China has a huge influence
on our experience and career development.”

PERCEPTIONS OF SCIENCE

Contrary to the common belief that science is always objective and “culture-free,”
science and engineering knowledge production, collaboration formation, and
information communications are significantly impacted by many factors, including
cultural values and practice, gender, immigration status, class and power hierarchy,
financial concerns, and other external and internal forces. Although scientists usually
perceive science as a field that is free from any bias and cultural misunderstandings,
the knowledge, practice, and interpretation of scientific calculations are deeply
embedded in social, economic, and cultural practices that are formed by the people
who are practicing them, the funding agencies, a nation’s political environment, and
other power relations.8 The findings from many anthropological and ethnographic

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CHAPTER 3

studies of science have “contradicted the ubiquitous images of Western science as

pure, independent from politics.”9 Science is considered by many people as culture-
free, yet numerous studies of science culture and practice suggest otherwise. The
experience of individual scientists, of any gender, nationality, or culture, must be
viewed in light of this context.
While science indicates the systematic knowledge produced by people who are
trained in certain scientific disciplines, the study of science and its culture is a process
by which historians, anthropologists, and sociologists examine the practice of science
and reveal that it is not autonomous and independent from society. As Laura Nader
discussed in her Naked Science: Anthropological Inquiry into Boundaries, Power,
and Knowledge, physicists who observe themselves with some candor may refer to
ideas and behaviors that are irrational, workplaces that are undemocratic, dissent
that is not tolerated, and cultural practices that are in conflict.10 While others idealize
physicists’ behavior as more rational, less subjective, and more advanced than the
lay public, physicists interested in moving beyond the meaning of idealized versions
of science explore how science and scientists have been affected by military and
corporate interest, the primary sources of funding, and the users of the discoveries of
physics. Introspection by physical and biological scientists provides anthropologists
with useful commentary for understanding the way cultures of science are formed
and institutionalized.
A noted historian of science, Pickering operationalized the terms “culture” and
“practice” in the study of science and society.11 He defined “culture” as “the field of
resources that scientists draw upon in their work,” and “practice” denotes “the acts of
making (and unmaking) that they perform in that field.”12 Pickering further cautioned
his readers that we should not regard “culture” and “practice” as synonymous, given
that “practice” refers to the actual act while “culture” entails the resources, tools, and
necessary networks that scientists utilize to produce the final products.
Anthropologist and historian Sharon Traweek studied high-energy physicists
who were trained in the same field but were from two different national cultures,
Japanese and American. She found that this group of physicists demonstrated various
levels of difference in the practice of doing science, and that their perceptions of
leadership, risks, and conflicts were deeply influenced by nationality, gender, race/
ethnicity, class, and educational background.13 Traweek later further emphasized the
importance of studying the culture of science. She asserted that the practice and
knowledge of science is deeply embedded and shaped by society.14
Traweek identified over twenty disciplines that study the culture and practice of
science, technology, and medicine. Each has its own theoretical and methodological
traditions that guide the design and practice of its particular studies. The design
and research analysis of the current study are closely related to three out of the five
subfields of gender studies of science. They are: (1) “the processes for excluding
women from scientific, medical, and technological work and the processes by which
women decide not to pursue work in these fields” (the research questions and goals

32
 INTERSECTIONALITY AND THE CULTURE OF SCIENCE

of this study); (2) “the effects of gender bias in scientific, medical, and technological
research” (the findings of this study demonstrate strong implicit gender bias within
physical sciences and engineering doctoral programs); and (3) the identification of
“how sciences, medicine, and engineering can be practiced in ways that are not
based on sexist assumptions” (the use of Chinese feminist perspectives and how they
shaped the design and data analysis of this study).15

BEHIND THE SCENES, YET CRITICAL FACTORS

A significant pool of literature has addressed some of the major barriers that women
are facing in the physical sciences and engineering. These challenges mainly
include having difficulty balancing work and family, being alienated by the male
dominated culture, and lacking mentoring opportunities and informal networks.16
These challenges could be traced back many decades, to when the physical sciences
and engineering fields were overwhelmingly male, in many areas exclusively so.
Many scholars have come to believe that the hostile macho culture and its negative
influence has disappeared as the number of women in science and engineering
program – and the workforce – has surged over the past two decades, but I have
found that there is still much resistance to women scientists and engineers.
One woman professor I interviewed received her PhD in the 1970s and was hired
for her first faculty position in the early 1980s. She reflected on the drastic changes
in gender climate in the male-dominated field of engineering in the U.S. since then,
but noted that the field still lags behind other physical sciences disciplines. She
argued, “female disadvantage still exists today, but it depends on the field and the
progression of the female faculty in the department.” The Chinese women faculty
interviewed also shared similar views. As one woman professor stated, “The more
examples there are that male colleagues see of women who have kids and [are]
exactly like the[ir] male colleagues, then they’re not as easily persuaded by someone
who might put something down or, you know, say something discouraging. But it
still happens.”
Many senior women scientists felt that “hostile culture” still exists, but that it
now takes a more implicit and subtle form. When it came to workplace interactions,
advancement opportunities, and research collaboration negotiations, the women
interviewed repeatedly shared experiences of implicit gender bias and harassment.
Women participants perceived the physical sciences and engineering infrastructures
as “research outcome driven” and felt that there was no mechanism for women
to report these implicit barriers that interfered with their scientific productivity
and success in academic careers. A women engineer in her 50s compared today’s
engineering culture to her graduate school experience and shared:
A department’s culture is really important. It’s more important when you’re a
faculty member than when you’re a student. Now it’s not common for male
faculty to put down female students. When I was going to graduate school that

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was much more common, [and there were] many fewer female students. There
were zero women faculty in all of engineering when I went to school there, and
I was among the first group of women to get a degree in mechanical engineering
there. That wasn’t that long ago. So when you’re the first, and when you really
stand out, and it’s a completely male dominated environment – my graduate
school’s climate and culture were very much ingrained in the faculty – the
sexist jokes [are] the sorts of things that are just commonly accepted.
This woman scientist acknowledged that today’s engineering culture is still
male-dominated. However, the “hostile environment” no longer exhibits itself in
an explicit form, especially when it comes to foreign-born women. This implicit yet
widespread phenomena negatively affects women’s retention and achievement in
their physical sciences and engineering programs.

GENDER AND SCIENCE IN A NON-EURO-AMERICAN CONTEXT

Gender is a key factor in science and engineering, yet it is rarely studied outside
of Euro-American contexts. A 1988 large-scale study of nearly 3,000 international
women scientists utilized UNESCO data from six countries – Argentina, India,
Egypt, Korea, Poland, and the USSR – and was one of the first studies to shed
some light on women scientists’ experiences in research groups.17 Six categories of
research activities within research groups were identified: research and experimental
development work; administrative activities; teaching and mentoring; information
archiving and documentation; theoretical dimensions of research activities, such as
hypotheses formation and theory conceptualization; and empirical dimensions of
research activities, which includes experiential work, data analysis, and conclusion
and report writing.
This large survey study found that although the data showed clear differences
in age groups, education, and R&D experience between the women from the six
countries, by and large the vast majority of women scientists from these countries
were occupying only basic research functional roles. Very few of the women held
higher ranking and management positions that allowed them to participate in
decision-making processes. Poland was the only outlier in this study; compared to
the other five countries, Polish research teams were more like to have women in
leadership roles. Women were expected to play teaching and mentoring roles and
were more likely than their male counterparts to participate in routine activities.
Women largely remained outside of communication and competition and their work
remained unrecognized. Surprisingly, however, regardless of the unrecognized and
routine nature of their work, women were more likely than their male peers to be
satisfied with their supervisors. They were reluctant to complain at all and hesitated
putting themselves forward to protest the fact that they were being left out, a
practice that contributed to a vicious cycle of organizational indifference or neglect.

34
 INTERSECTIONALITY AND THE CULTURE OF SCIENCE

Women biologists in India were experiencing difficulties in breaking gender

barriers, succeeding in academic science research, and struggling to be recognized
as credible scientists. As a result, many of them were dropping out early in their
careers.18 Scholars have attributed this to the culture and institutional infrastructure
that creates distinctly different expectations for men and women:

Women who complete their PhD in their late twenties are usually likely to
be under pressure to get married during the course of their doctoral work, or
immediately after. They also end up taking career breaks of a few months
to a few years for child-bearing and child-rearing. Taking time off always
affects careers adversely, and even more so where the work needs a lot of
infrastructure and teamwork, as for biologists. If a working scientist loses
touch completely for a couple of years, coming back becomes that much
more difficult. Employment rules frequently tend to have upper age limits for
positions. Many institutions have a convention of not offering jobs to husbands
and wives together, and inevitably, women suffer more from these practices
than do men. Gaps in careers can haunt women for the rest of their professional
lives even if they manage to make a comeback.19

Chinese women scientists in dual career relationships and marriages face

very similar challenges. Due to the patriarchal nature of Chinese culture, women
must shoulder nearly 100 percent of household, child-rearing, and elderly care
responsibilities. Confucian influence also perpetuates the concept of filial piety,
which pressures women to perform caregiving duties for their parents and their
husbands’ parents.20 These cultural traditions create extra barriers for Chinese
women scientists and engineers to break through.
A rather recent quantitative study of over 200 women scientists in Ghana, Kenya,
and India revealed major challenges for women regarding opportunities to access
certain key resources, travel internationally, participate in educational exchanges,
and belong to informal career networks.21 Particularly, women were less likely than
their male colleagues to have access to a personal computer at work; they were
also less likely to have a doctorate, or have had the opportunity to study in the
U.S. or Europe. In fact, women in this study reported that they rarely even traveled
outside of their organizations. These traits led to decreased opportunities for women
scientists in Ghana, Kenya, and India to work and study, and to establish and develop
their professional networks.
Professional networks were an area where women in the study reported they were
deficient: they rarely had informal networks that could provide the professional
knowledge and external funding information that would help them advance in their
careers. I argue that the reason why the Chinese women scientists and engineers
in my project have established extensive informal career networks is the many
years of marginalization in their educational and career development experiences.

35
CHAPTER 3

Their number one coping strategy was to develop a network of women scientists
and engineers who shared the same past, struggles, and difficulties. These informal
networks were not begun intentionally as a way to advance their careers. They started
purely as a “defense mechanism,” as a way of coping with the difficulties they faced
in new educational, cultural, and science and engineering environments. Over time,
Chinese women gradually started to use these networks to share resources, to gain
access to funding that they otherwise would not have been aware of, and to exchange
research ideas and institutional knowledge.
Kumar’s more recent study on women scientists’ experiences in Indian academia
provided insightful analyses of their current status in Indian science under the
influence of India’s various cultural, societal, and political powers.22 This work has
been extremely valuable in shaping the design of my project as it investigated and
explored Indian women scientists’ lived experiences through a postcolonial feminist
lens. Unlike in Kumar’s study, the group of women I studied were in the U.S., yet
the same intersectionality of culture, gender, and class played an equally strong role
in the Chinese community in the American science and engineering environments
that I studied. Kumar found that regardless of the recent 20 years of reform in India
that has aimed at improving women’s participation, experience, and success in
science, gender and class bias still persists. She also found that very few literature
and historical records could be retrieved regarding women in science, especially
those who came from lower castes.

THE EXPERIENCES OF CHINESE WOMEN SCIENTISTS

My positionality as an immigrant Asian woman social scientist who studies the

culture of science, engineering, and gender provides the first glance at Chinese
women’s experiences in the U.S. During my fieldwork, on multiple occasions,
Chinese male scientists laughed at my project, teased me about how little I knew
about engineering and physical sciences, or even told me that I was wasting my time
because now men and women were all pingdeng (平等), or equal, so there was no
longer any point to my research.
I was discouraged by this feedback. However, not long after, I began to hear more
from Chinese women scientists and engineers about their experiences observing
national differences when it came to gender relationships, and that is when I regained
my confidence. Many of them shared with me that they had experienced similar
situations during their daily work. I noticed that the younger and newer generation
of Chinese women and their very senior mentors were more likely than their middle-
aged peers to speak up regarding their experiences of American culture and how that
is impacting the way sciences are practiced in the U.S.
Traweek’s observation regarding tactics for higher energy physicists from
different countries to deal with conflicts was that they viewed themselves as “above
culture,” or in Traweek’s term, “supracultural”:

36
 INTERSECTIONALITY AND THE CULTURE OF SCIENCE

Regarding their scientific activity as supranational and supracultural is a way

for physicists to isolate their community from conflicts between their countries
and maintain the stable communications network necessary for their work.
The movement of Germans to Great Britain or Japanese to the United States
in certain years suggests that physicists are above politics and nationalism,
although political duress can threaten the proper pursuit of physics. Scientists
of all nationalities – Swiss, German, Italian, Scottish, English, French,
Australian, Polish, American, and Japanese – look as alike as possible in this
portrait gallery, signifying that culture is not an issue among them. Listing
the names and varied birthplaces again suggests that scientists emerge in all
cultures; the implication is that science and an aptitude for it are independent
of variables like culture. Most physicists would argue that there are no cultural
influences on their activities as scientists.23
Over the seven years of fieldwork with Chinese women scientists and engineers,
I also inevitably interacted with scientists from other countries. When I analyzed the
ways international women scientists and engineers interacted with each other, I saw
that they did not consider science to be above nationality in any way, as many of their
male colleagues pointed out to me. They were deeply attached to where they came
from and constantly reflected on how their culture, language, and communication
styles influenced their ability to conduct experiments and collaborate with their male
colleagues and international scientists in general.
Competitiveness is a trait that Chinese and American scientists saw in each other;
however, they both considered their counterparts to be more competitive. While some
Chinese scientists thought that their American counterparts were ultra-competitive
and outspoken, I heard on multiple occasions that Americans regarded their Chinese
counterparts to be much the same. Recent developments in Chinese higher education
have contributed to an increase in Chinese students/scholars’ competitiveness to
the Confucian educational model.24 In particular, there are two factors that work
to cultivate ultra-competitiveness among the Chinese scientists and engineers who
come to the U.S. First, the “one-chance” examination system in China only allows
students one chance to get into a good university and then graduate programs; this is
based entirely on entrance exam scores, and forces Chinese students to be extremely
focused from an early age. Second, the Chinese scientists and engineers who are
successful enough to be able to pursue studies in the U.S. all belong to the top-
ranked elite group of academics and scholars, the best of the best, as well as the
most ambitious, and this would make them appear to be more competitive than their
American counterparts. They have worked very hard to get to the U.S. and, like most
immigrants, are willing to do whatever it takes to succeed.
National cultural differences are particularly obvious at group meetings. One
woman scientist observed:
Americans are very outspoken at group meetings. They always have great
ideas. At least they think so and sometimes they would take some ideas that

37
CHAPTER 3

we (the Chinese group) spoke to them about informally and share it with the
group. We sometimes got to share the credit but most of the times our project
manager would think that they (the American scientists) are brilliant. I do
think Chinese women are too shy to speak up sometimes and that’s why I have
been trying to buck the trend. I think I earned some bad names for it, like the
masculine woman or the aggressive Chinese woman in the group.
Another factor that affects Chinese women’s experience in the U.S. is the
increasingly accelerated funding from the Chinese government directed towards
building more and better “world class universities,” with the goal of making China
a global leader in scientific research. These heavily funded initiatives have provided
many additional employment opportunities for Chinese-born, American-educated
physical scientists and engineers (as well as some Chinese-Americans), who are
increasingly returning to China after studying and working in the U.S. for many
years. While it is mostly males who are returning so far, and none of the women
that I interviewed, these developments and increasing opportunities have been very
helpful in establishing confidence in some Chinese women scientists’ minds.
Many of the women pointed out that communication and linguistic barriers
were a big part of their challenges in daily work and scientific experiments. They
discussed the few times when they were made fun of by their American or European
colleagues about their usage of certain English phases, and how they internalized their
resentment. They also described how they got extremely anxious when speaking in
group meetings and other presentations. They feared making mistakes in conveying
an idea, commenting on other team members’ suggestions, and especially suggesting
that someone was completely wrong.
Several Chinese women told me that they saved their critiques until after the
meeting and then tried to schedule an in-person meeting with the person who might
have made an invalid recommendation to the group. The practice of avoiding
uncomfortable situations regarding disagreements in large group settings was
widely observed among the Chinese-born women scientist and engineer groups that
I studied.
Culture is an underlying yet unspoken and underestimated concept in science
and engineering fields. Physicists, scientists, and engineers prefer to think that their
scientific practice is supracultural and thus that no social or cultural factors could
affect the way they conduct their research, communicate their research results,
or collaborate with their colleagues. However, all scientific inquiries, knowledge
production, collaborations, funding applications, and knowledge transmission
occur among people from different cultural, national, gender, and educational
backgrounds.
China and India are the two countries that have the largest immigrant scientist
and engineer populations present in the U.S. Even though a large number of women
in these two countries receive advanced degrees in science and engineering, very

38
 INTERSECTIONALITY AND THE CULTURE OF SCIENCE

few of them hold key research positions or have access to key monetary and human
capital resources, and they are rarely included in the formal collaborative networks.
Many of the challenges they face throughout their careers can be traced back to
the first step of their American journey – graduate school. This concept will be
elaborated on in the next section.

NOTES
1
Neelam Kumar, Women and Science in India: A Reader (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009).
2
Sue Vilhauer Rosser, The Science Glass Ceiling: Academic Women Scientists and the Struggle to
Succeed (New York: Routledge, 2004).
3
Kathryn Scantlebury, Jane Butler Kahle, and Sonya N. Martin, Re-Visioning Science Education From
Feminist Perspectives: Challenges, Choices and Careers (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2010).
4
The concept of intersectionality was first used in legal studies by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. It refers
to the intersections between forms or systems of oppression, domination or discrimination. These
forms include various biological, social, and cultural categories such as gender, race, class, ability,
sexual orientation, species, and other axes of identity that interact on multiple simultaneous levels. See
Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of
Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal
Forum 140 (1989): 139, http://philpapers.org/rec/CREDTI.
5
National Science Foundation, “Science and Engineering Indicator: 2012,” (Washington, DC: National
Science Foundation, 2012), http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind14/ (accessed May 10, 2015).
6
National Science Foundation, Thirty-Three Years of Women in Science and Engineering Faculty
Positions (Washington, DC: National Science Foundation, 2008), http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/
infbrief/nsf08308/ (accessed on July 25, 2011).
7
Sharon Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1988).
8
Laura Nader, Naked Science: Anthropological Inquiry into Boundaries, Power, and Knowledge
(New York: Routledge, 1996).
9
Nader, Naked Science, xiii.
10
Nader, Naked Science, 9.
11
Andrew Pickering, Science as Practice and Culture (Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
12
Pickering, Science as Practice and Culture, 3.
13
Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes.
14
Sharon Traweek, “An Introduction to Cultural, Gender, and Social Studies of Science and Technology,”
Journal of Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 17 (1993): 3–25.
15
Traweek, “An Introduction,” 14.
16
Catherine Hall, “Introduction,” History Workshop Journal 64, no. 1 (2007): 1–5; Anne E. Preston,
“Why Have All the Women Gone? A Study on Why Women Exit From the Science and
Engineering  Professions,” The American Economic Review 84 (1994): 1446–1462; Sue V. Rosser
and Mark Zachary Taylor, “Why Are We Still Worried About Women in Science?” Academe 95, no. 3
(2009), http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/2009/MJ/Feat/ross.htm (accessed February 12,
2012).
17
R. Chakravarthy, A. Chawla, and G. Mehta, “Women Scientists at Work: An International Comparative
Study of Six Countries,” Scientometrics 14, no. 1–2 (1988): 43–74.
18
Vineta Bal, “Women Scientists in India: Nowhere Near the Glass Ceiling,” Economic and Political
Weekly 39, no. 32 (2004): 872–878, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4415389 (accessed May 5, 2015).
19
Bal, “Women Scientists in India,” 878.
20
孝顺 or xiaoshun in Chinese. It is a virtue of respect for one’s father, elders, and ancestors. Women are
more likely to be held responsible for performing this virtue than men.

39
CHAPTER 3

21
Patricia Campion and Wesley Shrum, “Gender and Science in Development: Women Scientists in
Ghana, Kenya, and India,” Science, Technology and Human Values 29, no. 4 (2004): 459–485.
22
Kumar, Women and Science in India: A Reader.
23
Sharon Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes, 78.
24
Simon Marginson, “Higher Education in East Asia and Singapore: Rise of the Confucian Model,”
Higher Education 61, no. 5 (2011): 587–611.

40
 SECTION II
THE ACADEMIC ENVIRONMENT
AND GRADUATE STUDIES
 CHAPTER 4

WOMEN IN ACADEMIA

Chinese-born women scientists and engineers in the U.S. are influenced by both
Chinese and American academia, which each have their own history and cultural
traditions. This section provides historical, societal, academic, and cultural context
regarding the experiences of women students, including Chinese-born women, in
both Chinese and American academia.
The emphasis on Chinese academia lies in the historical context, current
governmental initiatives, and the unique cultural and gender roles that China has
assigned to many women scientists and engineers, many of which create additional
barriers for Chinese-born women to succeed in the U.S.
The particular focus of American academia is on graduate education, as it
provides  the platform for many Chinese-born women scientists’ first interactions
with American academic and social cultures. Consequently, what happens in
graduate school in large part sets the tone for the rest of their professional lives.
The section concludes with a discussion of postdoctoral work and its connection to
further career possibilities.

ACADEMIC PROFESSIONS AND THE IMPORTANCE OF

GRADUATE SCHOOL

The graduate school experience is an important component of this study because

graduate education is the “anticipatory socialization stage” of academic careers,
especially in science and engineering.1 However, mentoring relationships in physical
sciences and engineering programs, conceptualized as the most crucial component
of graduate education, have not been studied from the protégé’s point of view – that
is, based on the lived experiences of the students. More specifically, they have not
been studied from a Chinese woman’s point of view. Also, most research so far
has focused on pipeline issues and undergraduate women rather than on students’
experiences at the graduate level.2 Yet, Chinese-born women’s experiences in U.S.
graduate programs differ in many ways from those of their American counterparts and
have tremendous impact on their professional career development and transnational
networks upon graduation.
Some major characteristics of the academic profession include scholarly
devotion, required doctoral training, hierarchy of rank, and academic freedom.3
Millett characterized American academics as a group of professionals at the
service of others, holding high knowledge and technical skills, and obeying a code

43
CHAPTER 4

of ethics.4 The academic profession has many similarities with other professions;
however, the conceptualized definition of “profession” is not always clear. In his
1982 social study of American medicine, Starr provided a comprehensive definition
for profession as “an occupation that regulates itself through systematic, regulated
training and collegial discipline; that has a base in technical, specialized knowledge;
and that has a service rather than profit orientation enshrined in its code of ethics.”5
Clark undertook a series of groundbreaking studies on American and European
academic life, offering many insights into the special position that the academic
profession holds in the larger spectrum of the professional world.6 In The Academic
Life: Small Worlds, Different Worlds, Clark argued that while academic occupation
certainly fits the “scholarly concepts of profession,” defining the academic profession
from a general approach tends to overshadow the complexities brought about by
disciplinary and institutional differences.7
A factor that influences the nature of the academic profession is institutional
differentiation. Clark asserted, “as powerful as self-amplifying disciplinary
differences have become in dividing the American professoriate, intuitional diversity
now plays an even more important role.”8 Only one-third of all professors in the
U.S. work at doctoral-granting research universities, presenting a diverse range
of characteristics across institutions, but with some striking commonalities. Clark
drew attention to the disciplinary and institutional complexities within academic
professions.9 Graduate studies vary drastically among disciplines due to different
primary goals of training students to be independent scholars and researchers.
The growing gap between disciplines draws researchers’ attention to the specific
disciplinary characteristics that academic careers entail. For instance, Clark identified
major differences in the nature of academic work between humanities professors
and medical professors.10 In his research, humanities professors generally had lighter
teaching loads, more flexible office hours, and administrative responsibilities. They
normally interacted with a large number of undergraduate students in lectures and a
small number of graduate students during graduate seminars and dissertation committee
work. Unlike those professors, however, medical professors interacted frequently with
patients, nurses, and laboratory assistants, as well as students. Their schedules were
more tightly planned and could extend to over 10 hours a day, 7 days a week. Even
for tenured professors, salaries were highly influenced by the research funding they
secured as well as the changing policies and finances of the health care industry.
Compared to professors from other sectors, research university professors, such
as those in the sciences, normally spend at least half of their time researching with
their doctoral students, research staff, and colleagues. They have fewer teaching
responsibilities and are more likely to interact with graduate students. For leading
research universities, Clark found that “institutional and disciplinary cultures
converge” for the faculty due to the high-level reputation of scholarship produced
by cutting-edge departmental and disciplinary research.
Gender also plays a significant role in the process for women to socialize into
academic careers in science and engineering. Long and Fox suggested that five

44
 WOMEN IN ACADEMIA

dimensions exist regarding women’s career attainment in academic scientific

communities: the organizational environment, location of the institution,
professional rank, research productivity, and recognition by peers.11 These indicators
are especially significant in studying women’s careers in physical sciences and
engineering due to the special award system, demanding workload, and laboratory-
based research. Sax’s study on gender and college students drew our attention to
two important perspectives on students’ college experiences that influence their
academic outcomes: student faculty interactions and peer culture.12
Graduate schools are the first stop for many Chinese-born scientists and engineers
to enter American academia, workforce and society. Many of the previous studies
did not taken into consideration that foreign-born scientists’ experiences are largely
influenced by their national culture and its interaction with the culture of their graduate
program institution and culture. Understanding their graduate school experience is
the first step in exploring Chinese-born women scientists’ and engineers’ career
development, transnational collaboration strategies, and challenges in the U.S. Thus,
it is especially crucial to note the key characteristics of academic life in this sector
of postsecondary institutions.

WOMEN IN GRADUATE SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING PROGRAMS

Examining the current conditions of foreign-born women doctoral students in the

U.S. requires first a brief history of women’s participation in U.S. higher education
in general. Prior to the 1890s, women in the U.S., as in most of the rest of the
world, had virtually no access to graduate education.13 At that time women began
making enormous progress in pursing advanced degrees – so much so that in 1929
women earned 12 percent of the doctorates in scientific subjects awarded in the
U.S.14 However, up to the 1970s, there was “no record of the numbers of women
in engineering.”15
Today, the number of women students in the physical sciences and engineering
has grown, but not in a linear progression. At the undergraduate level, although
women began outnumbering men around 2000, the number of women who choose to
enter science and engineering still appears to be minimal. Astin and Astin’s national
study in the early 1990s revealed that the number of freshmen who choose to enter
or remain as science and math-based majors has declined. They also found that from
the freshman to senior year, the attrition rate of both female and male students in
science, mathematics, and engineering reached 40 percent.16
However, at the graduate level, the number of women doctoral degree recipients
has steadily increased. Based on a report from National Science Foundation (NSF),
the proportion of science and engineering doctoral degrees earned by women has
risen considerably in the past several decades, reaching 40 percent in 2014 compared
with 8 percent in 1958.17 Despite these increases, however, the number of women
scientists and engineers who entered academia upon receiving their doctorates
did not increase at the same rate. A report from the Committee on Professionals

45
CHAPTER 4

in Science and Engineering (CPSE) in 2006 showed that only 14.8 percent of all
physical sciences faculty members were female, and the figure was only 10.3 percent
in engineering departments. The NSF Science and Engineering Indicators report
illuminated another interesting phenomenon: the unbalanced ranking distribution
among women physical sciences and engineering academics.18
A national study on diversity in science and engineering faculties at research
universities by Nelson and Rogers revealed that there were few tenured and tenure-
track women faculty in most physical sciences and engineering departments and that
the “percentage of women among recent PhD recipients was much higher than the
percentage among assistant professors.”19 However, while Nelson and Rogers’ study
clearly defined current problems and barriers that potential women and minority
faculty might face based on large-scale survey results, it did not provide a sufficient
explanation of the reasons for and solutions to the problems.
In 2003, the number of full-time women professors in these fields was too small to
be included in the report. The majority of women faculty members were concentrated
at the assistant and/or part-time instructor/lecturer levels: 55.5 percent for physical
sciences and 58 percent for engineering. A more recent NSF report on women and
minorities in science indicated that women’s share of full professorships has more
than doubled since 1993. Despite this increase, women currently occupy only one-
fourth of senior faculty positions. In academic science and engineering, women are
more likely to concentrate at the assistant professor level.20 These statistics posed a
provocative question that has interested many scholars from the early 1970s: Where
did all the women physical scientists and engineers go?
A close examination of the citizenship status of academic science and engineering
positions through the NSF Science and Engineering Indicators Report shows that
of the 39,000 Asian/Pacific Islander doctorate holders employed in U.S. academia
in 2008, 9 percent were native-born U.S. citizens, 44 percent were naturalized
U.S. citizens, and 47 percent were noncitizens. In 2008, Asians/Pacific Islanders
represented 50 percent of the foreign-born faculty employed full-time in the United
States and 62 percent of the foreign-born doctorate holders with postdoctoral
appointments. In contrast, only 1 percent of native-born full-time faculty and
5 percent of native-born postdocs were Asians/Pacific Islanders.21
How many of these academic positions were held by women was not indicated
in this report. In fact, a cross-examination of all NSF and other governmental
agency reports on foreign-born scientific workforce reveals that foreign-born
women scientists’ and engineers’ data were not captured as a separate category. The
data about women scientists and engineers or both female and male foreign-born
scientists and engineers are easily located, but none of the existing datasets record
any statistics regarding foreign-born women scientists.
The 2014 NSF Science and Engineering Indicators report suggested that women
continued to enroll at disproportionately low rates in engineering (23 percent) and
physical sciences (33 percent). It also acknowledged that between 1973 and 2010,

46
 WOMEN IN ACADEMIA

Figure 7. Foreign-born students in science and engineering in the U.S., by place of birth.
National Science Foundation, Science and Engineering Indicator, 2014.22

the foreign-born portion of the faculty in science and engineering increased from
12 percent to 26 percent.23 However, what percentage of the students were women is
unknown. Foreign-born women scientists’ data are missing from nearly all science
and engineering educational and workforce reports.
Any examination of this problem requires much more than merely looking at the
statistics.24 When we take a closer look at the women and minority faculty and non-
academic positions data, many problems unveil themselves. Foreign-born scientists
and engineers are being considered as a homogeneous group. Gender is rarely a
variable for data collection and analysis. Furthermore, Asian women faculty are
considered to be the same as Asian American women faculty in many institutional
and National Science Foundation data sets.

GLASS CEILINGS: BARRIERS TO FACULTY CAREERS FOR WOMEN

A series of large-scale longitudinal studies conducted by the Committee on Science,

Engineering and Public Policy (COSEPUP) examined various concerns in the U.S.
science and engineering community, focusing on fulfilling the potential of women in
academic science and engineering. These studies, even though conducted a few years
ago, involved science and engineering professors, doctoral students, administrators,
and policymakers, and still provide the most thorough and reliable data available on
women’s academic careers in science and engineering. The report, Beyond Bias and
Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering,
identified four major barriers for women academics in science and engineering
today: persistent discrimination, implicit bias, insensitivity of evaluation criteria,

47
CHAPTER 4

and implicit patriarchal academic organizational structures.25 The findings from this
national study are extremely valuable in the examination and investigation of issues
concerning women in academic science and engineering.
The COSEPUP report also contended “the problem is not simply the pipeline.”26
This suggests new research should be directed away from studying the comparative
statistics of undergraduate science and engineering education, on which an
overwhelming amount of attention has been focused. The limited number of studies
focused on women graduate students and faculty members has tended to address
either their perceptions of mentoring or career development. But this approach
cannot provide an effective way of capturing and examining women doctoral
students’ “lived experiences” in physical sciences and engineering programs, or their
aspirations, considerations, and deliberations of academic careers in their mentoring
relationships.
Moving past the traditional research approaches of assessing “threshold effects”
that might keep women out of graduate programs or glass ceiling effects that might
distance women from promotion and advancement, Etzkowitz et al. examined
women’s experiences in doctoral programs and early faculty careers.27 They found
that women faced difficulties at all stages of the academic ladder, due to differentials
in socialization, advising patterns, and marriage/family responsibilities, as well
as implicit biases in the patriarchal science infrastructure. With respect to career
choices, a majority of women graduate students in Etzkowitz et al.’s study reported
that they were more likely to pursue an industrial rather than an academic career
since they felt it was “more compatible with family life.”28
Women doctoral students’ concerns with balancing family and career are
not surprising, given many studies on women academics revealed the constant
struggles between academic and family life due to the “greedy natures” of both.29
Ward and Wolf-Wendel conceptualized the “greedy natures” of both academic
and family life as “a workload that never ends, never having enough time in the
day, the ambiguities of tenure expectations, and the expectations for working a
‘second shift’ at home.”30 In a study of 30 junior women faculty from nine research
universities, Ward and Wolf-Wendel found that women faculty were more likely to
have a difficult time managing this “second shift” at home and balancing academic
productivity for tenure promotion with childcare responsibilities. Although their
study was not conducted among physical sciences and engineering faculty only,
other studies have suggested similar patterns occur among women professors in
science and engineering.31
Fox investigated the issues of women academics in science and engineering from
faculty members’ perspectives.32 In her study on organizational environments and
their relationship to women doctoral students’ progress in science and engineering,
she found that although many science and engineering programs showed an
improvement in the percentage of degrees awarded to women and a higher level of
women’s participation/performance due to enhanced organizational infrastructure

48
 WOMEN IN ACADEMIA

and leadership, “departments leave untouched the core of graduate education: the
adviser-advisee relationship.”33
Fox’s more recent quantitative study of tenured and tenure-track faculty in
prestigious research universities revealed two additional pressing concerns: (1)
“women remain outside of the heated discussion, inner cadres, and social networks
in which scientific ideas are aired, exchanged, and evaluated,” and (2) women were
more likely to face bidirectional interference between academic work and family/
household responsibilities.34
When modern academic professions as we know them now first began emerging
in the universities of medieval Europe, they initially only included a few subjects
and small groups of professionals. They only gradually became more specialized and
diverse, with serious distinctions between scientific subjects emerging as “natural
science” became “science” in the wake of the Enlightenment.
As mentioned above, Clark coined the phrase “small worlds, different worlds”
to describe the uniqueness of the professoriate in the U.S. context. Academe is
composed of many unique academic groups – small worlds – and there are
fundamental differences. The concept of “different worlds” perfectly portrays the
disciplinary, subject, and institutional differences across the academic profession.
Clark also acknowledged the complexity of studying American academic professions
and suggested that researchers should adopt various organizational approaches to
focus on specific contexts under such diverse structural and cultural settings.35 This
book takes one step further and argues that Chinese academic culture influences
the ways Chinese women scientists and engineers interact with and perform in
American academia.

NOTE
1
Ann E. Austin, “Preparing the Next Generation of Faculty,” Journal of Higher Education 73 (2002):
94–122.
2
Stephen G. Brush, “Women in Science and Engineering,” American Scientist 79 (1991); Larry
L. Leslie, Gregory T. McClure, and Ronald L. Oaxaca, “Women and Minorities in Science and
Engineering: A Life Sequence Analysis,” The Journal of Higher Education 69 (1998); Margaret M.
Nauta, Douglas L. Epperson, and Jeffrey H. Kahn, “A Multiple-Groups Analysis of Predictors of
Higher Level Career Aspirations Among Women in Mathematics, Science, and Engineering Majors,”
Journal of Counseling Psychology 45 (1998); Elaine Seymour, “The Loss of Women from Science,
Mathematics, and Engineering Undergraduate Majors: An Explanatory Account,” Science Education
79 (1995).
3
John Millett, The Academic Community: An Essay on Organization (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962).
4
Millett, The Academic Community.
5
Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 1982): 15.
6
Burton R. Clark, The Academic Life: Small Worlds, Different Worlds. A Carnegie Foundation Special
Report (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987); Burton R. Clark, “The Academic Life: Small
Worlds, Different Worlds,” Educational Researcher 18 (1989): 4–8; Burton R. Clark, “Small Worlds,
Different Worlds: The Uniquenesses and Troubles of American Academic Professions,” Daedalus 126
(1997): 21–42.
7
Clark, The Academic Life. Small Worlds, Different Worlds. A Carnegie Foundation Special Report, 22

49
CHAPTER 4

8
Clark, The Academic Life. Small Worlds, Different Worlds. A Carnegie Foundation Special Report, 26.
9
Clark, The Academic Life. Small Worlds, Different Worlds. A Carnegie Foundation Special Report.
10
Clark, The Academic Life. Small Worlds, Different Worlds. A Carnegie Foundation Special Report.
11
Scott J. Long and Mary Frank Fox, “Scientific Careers: Universalism and Particularism,” Annual
Review of Sociology 21 (1995): 45–71.
12
Linda Sax, The Gender Gap in College: Maximizing the Developmental Potential of Women and Men
(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008). (See also: Austin, “Preparing the Next Generation of Faculty”;
Ann Austin and Donald Wulff, Paths to the Professoriate: Strategies for Enriching the Preparation of
Future Faculty (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004); Mary Frank Fox, Gender, Hierarchy, and Science
(New York: Springer US, 1999); Mary Frank Fox, “Participation, Performance, and Advancement of
Women in Academic Science and Engineering: What Is at Issue and Why,” Journal of Technology
Transfer 31 (2006): 377–386; William G. Tierney and Robert A. Rhoads, Enhancing Promotion,
Tenure and Beyond: Faculty Socialization as a Cultural Process (Washington, DC: George
Washington University Press, 1994); John E. Van Maanen and Edgar H. Schein, Toward A Theory Of
Organizational Socialization (Cambridge: M.I.T. Alfred P. Sloan School of Management, 1977).
13
John R. Thelin, A History of American Higher Education (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2004).
14
Eleanor L. Babco and Betty M. Vetter, Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology, and
Scientific Manpower Commission, Professional Women and Minorities: A Total Human Resources
Data Compendium, (Washington, DC: Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology,
2002).
15
Cinda-Sue Davis, Angela B. Ginorio, Carol S. Hollenshead, Barbara B. Lazarus, and Paula M.
Rayman, The Equity Equation: Fostering the Advancement of Women in the Sciences, Mathematics,
and Engineering (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996): 127.
16
Alexander A. Astin and Helen. S. Astin, Undergraduate Science Education: The Impact of Different
College Environments On the Educational Pipeline in the Sciences (Los Angeles: Higher Education
Research Institute, UCLA, 1993).
17
National Science Foundation, “Science and Engineering Indicator: 2014,” (Washington, DC: National
Science Foundation, 2014), http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind14/ (accessed April 8, 2015).
18
Committee on Professionals in Science and Engineering, Professional Women and Minorities: A Total
Human Resources Data Compendium (Washington, DC: Commission On Professionals in Science
and Technology, 2006); National Science Foundation, “Science and Engineering Indicator: 2014.”
19
Donna Nelson and Diana Rogers. A National Analysis of Diversity in Science and Engineering
Faculties at Research Universities (Washington, DC: National Organization for Women, 2004), 2.
20
National Science Foundation, 2015 Report on Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in
Science and Engineering (Washington, DC: National Science Foundation, 2015).
21
National Science Foundation, “Science and Engineering Indicator: 2012.”
22
National Science Foundation, “Science and Engineering Indicator: 2014.”
23
National Science Foundation, “Science and Engineering Indicator: 2014.”
24
Davis et al., The Equity Equation.
25
Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy, Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the
Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering (Washington, DC: National Academy
Press, 2007).
26
Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy, Beyond Bias and Barrriers, 2.
27
Henry Etzkowitz, Carol Kemelgor, and Brian Uzzi, Athena Unbound: the Advancement of Women in
Science and Technology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
28
Etzkowitz et al., Athena Unbound, 6.
29
Kelly Ward and Lisa Wolf-Wendel, “Academic Motherhood: Managing Complex Roles in Research
Universities,” Review of Higher Education 27 (2003): 243; Linda Grant, Ivy Kennelly, and Kathryn
B. Ward, “Revisiting the Gender, Marriage, and Parenthood Puzzle in Scientific Careers,” Women’s
Studies Quarterly 28 (2000).
30
Ward and Wolf-Wendel, “Academic Motherhood,” 243.

50
 WOMEN IN ACADEMIA

31
Mary Frank Fox, “Women in Science and Engineering: Theory, Practice, and Policy in Programs,”
Signs 24 (1998); Robert K. Toutkoushian and Valerie Martin Conley, “Progress for Women in
Academe, Yet Inequities Persist: Evidence from NSOPF 99,” Research in Higher Education 46
(2005); Yu Xie and Kimberlee A. Shauman, Women in Science: Career Processes and Outcomes
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).
32
Mary Frank Fox, “Current Status of Women within the Professions – Organizational Environments
and Doctoral Degrees Awarded to Women in Science and Engineering Departments,” Women’s Studies
Quarterly 28 (2000): 57.
33
Fox, Mary Frank. 2000. “Organizational Environments and Doctoral Degrees Awarded to Women in
Science and Engineering Departments”. Women’s Studies Quarterly 28 (1/2). The Feminist Press at
the City University of New York: 47–61. Page 57.
34
Mary Frank Fox, “Women and Men Faculty in Academic Science and Engineering: Social-
Organizational Indicators and Implications,” American Behavioral Scientist 53 (2010).
35
Clark, Burton R., and Rockefeller Foundation. The Academic Profession: National, Disciplinary, and
Institutional Settings (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987).

51
 CHAPTER 5

THE INFLUENCE OF CHINESE ACADEMIA

AND CULTURE

Most Chinese women scientists and engineers received their K-12 education and
their bachelor’s degrees from one of the top Chinese universities. This chapter
describes the key context of Chinese academia, its history, and the story of women’s
participation in education, as well as its influence on Chinese women students’
lived experiences in their U.S. classrooms and research teams. It proposes a key
component of studying all aspects of foreign-born women’s lived experiences in
other countries – understanding the background of their educational systems within
the context of their home countries. Although the focus here is on Chinese women,
much of this holds true for women from other parts of the world as well – India, the
Mideast, South America, Eastern Europe, and so on.
In conjunction with Chinese cultural influences, this chapter also zeroes in
on several key challenges that Chinese women students face when they confront
the cultural differences between Chinese and American academia and analyzes
the probable causes of these challenges. Understanding the context provided in
this chapter is crucial to drawing informed conclusions about Chinese women
scientists’ and engineers’ transnational networks, career development strategies, and
collaboration patterns.

CHINESE WOMEN

This research project found strong connections between Chinese culture, Chinese
educational systems and schema, and the challenges faced by Chinese women in
American science and engineering programs. Many daily challenges the women
faced were due to language problems, communication gaps, and a lack of familiarity
with American academia. Yet, very few if any departmental or institutional resources
were provided to help them cope with these challenges. In addition, their idealized
views of advisers’ roles, influenced by Confucian educational philosophy, which
are at odds with American practices, further contributed to a habit of deference that
often leads to low self-esteem. Advisers’ criticism could be devastating to them.
Further complicating matters, they were dependent on their American advisers to
sponsor their standing in graduate programs in order to keep their visas valid, which
created an unequal power dynamic. My research reveals that American advisers
occasionally use visa sponsorship and scholarship decisions as leverage to make
Chinese women students work extra hours without giving them credit. In most cases,
these warnings or threats are implicit – yet they are constant.

53
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Chinese socio-cultural expectations create further difficulties and increase pressure.

In China, women, regardless of achievement level, are expected to get married
before the age of 30. Otherwise, they will have a very hard time finding a partner.
Although many Chinese scientists and engineers decide to stay in the U.S., despite
the difficulties, those who decide to return to China upon the completion of their
PhD  also face problems, particularly age and marital status discrimination in
Chinese faculty hiring practices.

BACKGROUND ON CHINESE ACADEMIA

Given the high level of participation of Chinese-born scientists and engineers in the
U.S., it is crucial to understand the context of some key historical events that have
impacted today’s Chinese academic profession. I believe that in order to study and
understand the lived experiences of foreign-born scientists and engineers in the U.S.
it is necessary to examine their home country’s academic environments and to be
able to view their experiences within their own unique cultural context.
Recent educational reforms in China are dedicating large amounts of governmental
funding in forms of scholarships to educate millions of youth as their families move
from rural to urban areas. Some scholars compare this phenomenon to the G.I. Bill
incentive in the U.S. that helped World War II veterans to attain higher levels of
education.1 In 2014 alone, the Chinese government invested over $250 billion in
human capital and education, including general education from the K-12 level on up,
basic research, and students’ access to higher education and infrastructures.2
The outcomes of these efforts have been impressive: Between 2000 and the
present, China has doubled the number of colleges and universities, with the current
number slightly over 2,400. In 2013, China produced 8 million graduates from its
universities and two-year colleges.3 In 2015, China had approximately 7.49 million
college graduates, nearly 70 percent in the sciences and engineering.4 However,
even though China outnumbered the U.S. in terms of the number of graduates, when
measured as a percentage of the population, it is still behind.
Yet quantity does not necessarily amount to quality. Regardless of the profound
increase in numbers, the quality of Chinese higher education still leaves much to
be desired, especially when it comes to the candidate pool for Chinese academic
positions. The rapidly growing enrollment in higher education institutions and the
increasing number of colleges carry heavy consequences. First, the blind pursuit of
increased enrollment and revenue has resulted in a shortage of qualified professors
in universities. In tier two and three universities, it is rather common to see lecturers
who do not have doctoral degrees or professional backgrounds teaching and
advising students. Second, the unemployment rate is rather high among college
graduates. There were 1.5 million out of 5.1 million college graduates who were
unemployed upon graduation in 2008.5 In 2010, there were 2.3 million out of
5.7 million graduates who could not find jobs upon graduation.6

54
 THE INFLUENCE OF CHINESE ACADEMIA AND CULTURE

Another challenge that Chinese academia faces is the shortage of professors in

science and engineering programs, although this is not due to the lack of qualified
PhDs. According to the Ministry of Education data, in 2013 alone, China granted
over 28,727 doctoral degrees in science and engineering.7 The problem is the
depressingly low pay for university professors. Take the field of engineering as an
example: It is the most popular major in China yet the monthly pay for a zhujiao
(助教), or the equivalent of assistant professor in North American universities, is on
average merely $400.
Due to the low pay of teaching careers, many professors are implementing three
strategies to increase their earnings. The first strategy is to obtain a leadership position
in the university administration, although one must be a Communist Party member in
order to be promoted through the administrative track. Other professors have begun
their own companies and are spending a lot of time on those businesses instead of
focusing on teaching and research. The third type of professor tends to take on as
many research projects with funding as possible. Instead of focusing on the quality
of research, they focus on the quantity of publications and citation rates. All three
types of professors’ pay and research funding are directly impacted by the ways that
Chinese universities are funded.
In China, the state has traditionally been the only funder of higher education,
with the result that the central and local governments have been directly in charge
of higher education institutions. In addition to providing funding and investment,
the governments at the national and local levels have had full power over such
matters as admissions policies, courses and teaching, employment of graduates, etc.
Private foundations that provide research funding and donations are rare. Colleges
and universities, with limited autonomous rights, have thus been run completely in
accordance with the government’s plan, and have thus come to be managed primarily
as administrative organizations rather than academic ones.8 This funding structure
severely affects academic freedom in Chinese academia.
During the 1980s, due to public funding challenges and the government’s
initiatives to introduce free-market mechanisms into the Chinese economic system,
the state reduced the amount of funding supplied to higher education institutions
and began to transition them into more pluralistic funded systems, looking for
funding from sources other than the government. Universities were encouraged
to build programs, increase tuitions, and expand enrollment to bring in additional
funding. Many government-funded research entities began to award research grants,
and university professors were encouraged to collaborate with industry and seek
overseas funding to bring in additional revenue.9
Chinese government funding and tuition income supports nearly all public
universities’ operational costs, professors’ salaries, and other teaching-related
expenses. Research funding for universities is obtained through three major
channels: First, zongxiang keyan jingfei (纵向科研经费), or vertical research
funding. This type refers to the set amount of research funding allocated by the

55
CHAPTER 5

national, provincial, or municipal government offices.10 It is meant to support basic

science research, nonprofit research, national security-related, and R&D high-value
research. The second type is called hengxiang keyan jingfei (横向科研经费), or
horizontal research funding. This type refers to research funding that comes from
privately owned corporations. The third type is benxiao keyan jingfei (本校科研
经费), or institutional-based catalyst funding. This type is based on institutional
needs, and although its original funding comes from the central government, each
institution has a high degree of autonomy in decision making. It is noteworthy
that the vast majority of the research funding for Chinese universities still comes
from the government. In 2010, approximately 70 percent of the research funding
in Chinese universities came from the government, as compared to approximately
25 percent in the U.S.11
Chinese academia has shown serious brain drain during the past two decades: Its
best and brightest graduates in science and engineering have come to prefer doing
their graduate studies in the U.S. Many bright young people and their families see
many benefits of studying in the U.S.: academic prestige, better employment and
the opportunity to “hedge their risk against Chinese internal political and economic
turbulence.”12
There is a disparity in socioeconomic status among Chinese undergraduates and
graduate students in the United States. Prior to 2010, the vast majority of Chinese
undergraduate students were nearly all from wealthy families. They demonstrate a
very wide array of academic ability, from terrible (many wealthy Chinese families
send their children who could not pass the competitive Chinese university entrance
exam to the U.S. for undergraduate education) to outstanding.13 Nearly all Chinese
graduate students in the U.S. have bachelor’s degrees from top-tier Chinese
universities. Many of them are in the U.S. sponsored by either Chinese governmental
scholarships or American university research fellowships.

HISTORY OF WOMEN’S PARTICIPATION IN

CHINESE HIGHER EDUCATION

The development of women’s participation in education in China began in the early

1900s when the first private girls schools were founded. These schools were mostly
K-12 small-scale institutes that only wealthy families’ daughters could attend.
Gradually, public schools for girls were founded and that was when daughters
from middle class families first began to have the possibility of receiving formal
education.  However, women were banned from enrolling in institutions of higher
learning until 1922. This nearly unthinkable milestone was triggered by the May
Fourth Movement, which began in China on May 4th, 1919. This unleashed the
resentment and anger of the Chinese masses, and saw the beginning of the women’s
liberation movement in China. The movement was initially triggered by the anger
built up over Germany’s refusal to return Shandong Province to China after World
War I at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. The corrupted Northern Warlord

56
 THE INFLUENCE OF CHINESE ACADEMIA AND CULTURE

government prepared to sign the treaty, which transferred Shandong Province to

Japan from Germany. The anger from the Chinese masses finally erupted. Thousands
of Chinese students gathered at Tiananmen Square to demonstrate and protest.
However, women students were absent from this protest, as they were kept away by
the school authorities.
Inspired by these events, on May 19th, a 23-year-old elementary school teacher,
Ms. Deng, wrote a formal proposal to the president of Peking University, asking the
university to lift the ban on enrolling women students. She stated in the letter that
university admissions should be based on merit and that women and men should
have equality in admissions and be educated in the same schools, in the same classes.
The then Peking University president, Cai Yuanpei, and his leadership team strongly
supported this initiative and Peking University became the first higher education
institution to allow women to audit its classes. In the fall semester in that year,
Peking University and a few other universities in Beijing began formally enrolling
women for their incoming freshmen class. Many universities began to follow the
wave, which signified a milestone in the development of women’s education.14
Even though some universities began to lift bans for admitting women students,
the number of women attending educational institutions was shockingly low during
the next three decades following the 1919 May 4th movement. The few women who
were able to attend schools in the 1920s and 1930s were mostly taught women’s
virtues, with the curriculum largely designed and guided by male teachers and
administrators. The purpose of schooling for women remained, to a large extent,
merely to make them better wives and mothers. They also received far fewer years of
education than their male counterparts.15 Despite the limited improvements, by late
1940, over 90 percent of Chinese women were still illiterate.16
After the founding of People’s Republic of China, the Communist government
started promoting gender equality educational policies and implemented them from
elementary to higher education. Based on Marxist ideology, Mao issued an official
statement to support this gender equality effort: fu nü neng ding ban bian tian
(妇女能顶半边天), or women hold up half of the sky. This concept, although equating
gender equality to pure quantitative equality, was revolutionary and impactful on
women’s education in the 1940s and later. The Chinese Women Federation was
founded around the same time and was put in charge of educating Chinese women.
Under many educational initiatives designed for women and the passing of new laws
on gender equality, more women were able to attend school for at least five years. By
the end of 1965, fewer then 30 percent of Chinese women were illiterate and over
32 percent had completed their secondary education.

THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION

The Cultural Revolution halted Chinese higher education for over 10 years,
wrongfully prosecuted many intellectuals, and destroyed a large number of
invaluable historical, scholarly, and cultural artifacts. It had a devastating effect

57
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on all aspects of Chinese higher education and stymied or destroyed the careers of
countless academics and other professionals. Between 1966 and 1968, most of the
postsecondary educational institutions were shut down, and by 1972 all universities
and colleges had been closed. The entire nation’s youth responded to Mao Zedong’s
massive campaign against the opposition party.
A large part of the Cultural Revolution was the encouragement of advancement,
including educational opportunities, based on political loyalty to the Communist
Party rather than on merit or intellectual ability. Intellectuals and scholars were
considered to be zi chan jie ji (资产阶级), or bourgeois.17 In other words, they
were treated as the “bad class” during the Cultural Revolution era. The “good
class” consisted of people who were factory workers, peasants, and those with
non-intellectual backgrounds. University entrance examinations were abandoned,
and all admissions depended on applicants’ political loyalty to the Communist Party
instead of academic merit.18 During these 10 years, many outstanding academics
were sent to work in factories and labor camps in rural China, which was a policy
named xia fang (下放), or send-down.
It was not until the late 1970s and early 1980s that graduate education was fully
resumed and admissions returned to merit-based selection criteria.19 But when
colleges first began re-admitting students in 1977, the applicant pool was overly
large, institutions were in disarray, and there weren’t enough resources to admit all
those who wanted to enroll. The turmoil of the Cultural Revolution has had lasting
effects on higher education and directly impacted today’s academic profession in
China. Today, nearly 40 years later, only approximately one-third of the faculty at
Chinese colleges and universities have graduate degrees. This is largely due to the
aftermath of the Cultural Revolution and its policy of condemning the intellectuals,
destroying cultural artifacts and books, and closing down the universities. As noted
previously, when it was over many educated people left China, and not until the most
recent U.S. economic recession have significant numbers of U.S.-trained Chinese
scholars begun returning.

CHINESE GRADUATE EDUCATION SINCE THE 1970S

After the death of Mao in 1976, Deng Xiaoping regained prominence, and by 1978
things began to change. Science and engineering education became top priorities
for the Chinese government and universities as they were more likely to support the
modernization of China. This was largely due to the Open Door policy introduced
by Deng Xiaoping.
Ever since the resumption of graduate school entrance exams in 1978, Chinese
students have been admitted to one of four types of graduate schools each year.20
These are the traditional colleges and universities, the Chinese Academy of
Sciences, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and the research institutes run
by provincial governments.

58
 THE INFLUENCE OF CHINESE ACADEMIA AND CULTURE

The first type of school, traditional colleges and universities, admits the largest
number of graduate students. These institutions are the equivalent of research
universities in the U.S. They admit both undergraduate and graduate students but
carry heavy research responsibilities. Admission to the top 30 programs, those with
the highest ranking as well as the most desirable locations, is extremely competitive.
Students who obtain master’s, doctoral, or professional degrees from these
institutions mostly end up working in government agencies, research think tanks, or
university teaching positions.
The second type is the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the third is the Chinese
Academy of Social Sciences. These two types admit only a very small number of
graduate students to their three-year programs, and these students future research
and/or academic careers are nearly guaranteed. Many students in these two types of
academies use their first year to take discipline-related courses through the academy
or sometimes in collaboration with the local universities. They typically spend the
next two years doing research under the supervision of a seasoned scholar. The vast
majority then study in the U.S. or Europe. Since these institutions only admit the
very best students in each discipline, these two academies serve as important points
of connection for Chinese graduate students’ life-long professional networks, both
within and outside of China.
The fourth type of graduate schools comprise specialized research institutes
operated under the direct leadership of provisional governments. These institutes
differ from traditional colleges and universities as they do not admit undergraduate
students but only admit and train highly specialized graduate students who to a
large extent will be placed within the institute system upon graduation. Many of
these institutes are based in Beijing and operate under the supervision and direction
of the central government. For example, there is the Beijing Municipal Research
Institute of Environmental Protection. Later in this book, the transnational networks
of women scientists and engineers formulated through these connections will be
discussed in detail.
Applicants to graduate school must fulfill a series of stringent requirements prior
to even being allowed to formally apply. They then must go through extremely
thorough physical examinations, and students with disabilities, severe vision or
hearing problems, tuberculosis, or other diseases are forbidden from even taking the
exams. The eligibility requirements have not changed since the 1980s, although a few
have been slightly revised. For example, the age limitation for applying to graduate
programs has gone up from 35 to 40 years old; and students with disabilities might
be eligible to apply if their undergraduate advisers recommend they do so. Many
scholars suggest that the stringent physical requirements eliminate a significant pool
of talented young applicants.21
Upon meeting the criteria for physical requirements, applicants can then apply
to take the Graduate School Entrance Exam. This exam occurs between November

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and December each year. It consists of a two-day exam that includes politics (mostly
Chinese political philosophy and Marxist political thought), a foreign language, and
a specialty test that aims at examining an applicant’s disciplinary knowledge. The
selection of a graduate student is based mainly on the cumulative scores on these
tests. The politics and foreign language examinations are centrally standardized
by the Chinese Ministry of Education, while the specialty tests are designed and
administered by the particular graduate school that an applicant is applying for.
There are three categories of specialty tests, depending on the discipline that an
applicant wishes to pursue: Education/History and medicine; agriculture; and
physical sciences, engineering and economics.22
After the final scores of the Graduate School Entrance Exam are released, each
university announces their bottom line scores for admitting students. All applicants
who have scores higher than the bottom line scores become eligible to participate
in the second round of the selection process, which consists of interviews with
departments and potential advisers. This process is highly decentralized and thus
leaves much room for recommendations, favoritism, and cheating behaviors.
Full-time master’s and PhD programs (quan zhi or 全职) are more highly regarded
than part-time programs (zai zhi or 在职). Unlike Chinese undergraduate admissions,
which are based solely on applicants’ cumulative scores during the entrance exam,
graduate programs may admit someone whose cumulative scores are not as high
but who demonstrates exceptional disciplinary competence. While some may argue
that this is a positive criterion for the discipline, the lack of transparency in the final
stage of selecting graduate students leaves much room for Chinese graduate advisers
and university administrators to play favorites and even take bribes through various
channels.
It is widely known among the academic community that a powerful university
administrator could easily enroll in a part-time program and “buy” a doctoral degree
through their connections with a faculty adviser or a graduate program. A Chinese
phrase accurately captures this kind of phenomenon: zou hou men (走后门), or
going through the back door (bribery). This practice has been fairly common in
Chinese academia for over a decade now, and many scholars are concerned over the
phenomenon as it severely violates academic ethics and negatively influences the
quality of scholarship.

AGE AND GENDER DISCRIMINATION

The Chinese women scientists and engineers I interviewed had all gone on to U.S.
doctoral programs upon their graduation from their undergraduate institutes in
China. This pattern was well documented across all U.S. science and engineering
programs. Nearly all of the students were in their early or mid-twenties, without
any prior working experience, and either full-time or part-time.23 They have mostly
spent their entire lives in formal education systems without any understanding of the
professional world.

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 THE INFLUENCE OF CHINESE ACADEMIA AND CULTURE

One deeper reason behind this phenomenon is embedded in Chinese socio-

cultural traditions and educational practices.24 Culturally, young people from middle
and upper class families are expected to complete the highest level of education they
can in their 20s so that they can embark on their career development journey before
they turn 30. Thus, they and their families focus all of their energies on that. The
age 30 carries deep sociocultural meaning in China. Confucius referred to age 30 as
er li zhi nian (而立之年), or the year of independence, the age for taking on duties,
and determining goals. In other words, in the context of Chinese culture, the vast
majority of people believe that a young person’s adulthood and career development
should start around age 30.
Another reason for this practice is the age discrimination practices in Chinese
graduate program admissions and scholarship selection practices. Age restrictions
have been in effect since the 1980s that require applicants of graduate programs to
be under the age of 40. While similar age limitations are practiced in some North
American graduate programs, there are no formal rules restricting older applicants’
eligibility for these programs. This age restriction used to be capped at 35 but was
recently changed to 40 due to the complaints from many scholars regarding such a
discriminatory practice. Similar age restrictions are also seen in university hiring
practices.25
The age restriction is worsened by gendered discrimination. In many science and
engineering departments, there are unwritten rules that the department only hire
single women as assistant professors, or those who have married and have already
given birth to a child; this is so they will not “waste” departmental resources after
they come on board.26 Male candidates are almost always preferred over women for
the same reasons. While there have been some recent efforts by the government to
change the age-based hiring practices, albeit very slowly, there are still no policies
to address the gender-age-based discrimination.
The intersectionality of gender and age puts women scientists and engineers who
have received their doctoral degrees in a very difficult situation: if they are married
and have given birth to a child, it will make them approximately 33 years old. If they
end up being hired by a department, given that the compulsory retirement age is 55
for women in Chinese academia (compared to 60 for men, although the government
has recently announced plans to extend women’s retirement age to 56), the women
professor only has 20 years to work on her scholarship, teaching, and research. Thus,
Chinese women academics face severe discrimination based on their age, marital
status, and whether or not they have children. Later in their careers, they are forced
to retire early.

CONFUCIAN EDUCATION PHILOSOPHY AND

STUDENT-PROFESSOR RELATIONSHIPS

To begin understanding the cause of all these problems, we must first investigate the
guiding philosophy behind thousands of years of the Chinese educational system:

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the Confucius cultural heritage and collectivism.27 Tweed and Lehman precisely
summarized the differences between the guiding philosophies of Chinese and Euro-
American ways of learning:
Confucian-oriented learning … involves effort-focused conceptions of
learning, pragmatic orientations to learning, and acceptance of behavioral
reform as an academic goal. Socratic-oriented learning … involves overt
and private questioning, expression of personal hypotheses, and a desire for
self-directed tasks.28
Examinations at various levels are an important aspect of Chinese education.
This educational tradition is derived from the Confucian philosophy, which holds
that government officials should be recruited on the basis of merit rather than
family background. Confucius maintained that the governance of the state required
administrative staff who not only understood the rituals and ceremonies of public
and private life, but who also had moral virtues and possessed constructive and
rational approaches to interpersonal, relational, and moral problems. Confucius
himself was an example of being ambitious and attempting to make a career in the
then governments through his own learning, although in his own lifetime he was
never promoted to an official position that would acknowledge and reward him for
his knowledge.
These differences help define the ways Chinese students are behaving, believing,
and interacting with their peers in U.S. science and engineering programs, and they
are also the cause of many of the challenges that Chinese students are facing in
American academia. Confucian educational philosophy encourages learning the
knowledge taught by authorities, and respecting the books and teachers by never
questioning them. It also highly stresses the value and importance of examinations
and the hierarchical system. These characteristics have led it to become the guiding
educational philosophy of the ruling class in China ever since the emergence of
the Han Dynasty during the third century B.C.E. It is deeply imbedded in the
contemporary Chinese educational system.29
Many Chinese students bring this kind of philosophy with them when they attend
American higher education programs. As a result, they perceive their American
counterparts’ behavior of questioning professors’ viewpoints, and doubting what is
written in textbooks as well as their strong tendencies towards self-expression as
rude or disrespectful.
These cultural traits create more communication problems between Chinese
students and their American peers, male or female, and another type of barrier
between female students and male professors. Women students are markedly less
outspoken compared to their male counterparts, as “it is considered as impolite for
a woman to question authority in front of a group of people.” Confucian education
philosophy to a large level reflects political utilitarianism, as it promotes cultivating
moral virtues of people through learning and teaching with the ultimate purpose of
maintaining the harmony of its society, even at the expense of the individual.30

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ROLE OF TEACHERS

The Confucian style of educational philosophy designates the teacher as the authority
of knowledge, mentor of virtues, and guiding adviser. The term for education, jiao
shu yu ren (教书育人), or teach books and nurture people, itself conceptualizes
Chinese teachers as the masters of knowledge and those holding the highest level
of moral standards. Chinese students are taught with this kind of education schema
in their K-12 and undergraduate educations and learn to idolize their professors as
saints. Thus, they rarely ask questions, much less criticize their teachers. And the
teachers do not encourage questioning or critical thought.
In contrast, North American professors usually regard their role, especially at
the graduate level, as primarily to assist students’ learning and development by
encouraging their curiosity, questioning, and discussion of current concepts and
knowledge, a tradition derived from Socratic philosophy.31 They view criticism as
being helpful, not offensive, and consider teaching critical thought to be part of their
job; but Chinese students often misinterpret this, since they are not used to harsh
treatment from their teachers. This does not mean that American professors have the
intention to be hurtful. The difference is that Chinese professors usually use very
indirect language to point out the weaknesses in students’ work while American
professors’ comments and criticism are comparatively more direct. This advising
style difference makes some Chinese students perceive their American professors’
feedback in a negative light.
In multiple interviews, a large number of Chinese women reported incidents
where their confidence and self-esteem were crushed due to their American doctoral
advisers’ negative comments about their scholarly, linguistic, and cultural abilities.
As one student succinctly put it, “My adviser told me that I will never be able to
write a decent paper and I will never be able to find a job in American academia.”
This student was crying when she repeated to me what she was told by her professor.
While this person may still have much work to do in terms of improving her writing
and speaking abilities, her professor’s accusation was insulting to her as he called
her “stupid” and “slow.” It was devastating to this Chinese student, as she considered
her adviser to be the “sage” or the “knowledge authority.” Chinese women were
often the victims of this kind of behavior as they were stereotypically identified as
the “weak and nerdy Asian female.”
The student-teacher relationship is further complicated by an old Confucian
concept regarding teacher student relationships: yi ri wei shi, zhong shen wei fu
(一日为师，终身为父). The literal translation of this idiom is “a teacher for one
day [equals/is] a father for the whole life.”32 It is interesting to examine this old
philosophical concept through a gender lens. I question the choice of the word “father”
instead of “mother.” Many Chinese women students regard their doctoral advisers
as father figures and so they do not question their advisers’ feedback and behaviors.
This guiding philosophy was known by every woman scientist and engineer I
interviewed but none of them realized that it applied to them. Yet, nearly all of them

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spoke about this term when I asked them why they did not report their advisers’
misconduct to the university. I argue the socio-cultural implication suggested by
this saying heavily influences the relationships between Chinese students and their
American professors. From the Chinese students’ perspective, their professors are
regarded as their fathers and as the ultimate experts in their fields.
On the other hand, their American professors do not see themselves that way.
Their goal is to encourage students to learn and create their own knowledge instead
of playing a father figure. This explains why so many Chinese women are easily
devastated by their advisers’ disagreement or disapproval when it comes to their
academic ability.

COMMUNICATION IN THE CLASSROOM

One of the most prevalent challenges that nearly all Chinese students first face upon
their transition into a U.S. university occurs in classrooms and involves their daily
communications with American peers. The language challenges were described by
many Chinese women in this study as the first hurdle they had to jump over after
moving to the U.S. In addition, Chinese students are often put off by American
students’ directness and self-centeredness, while American professors are puzzled by
what appears to them as Chinese students’ unwillingness to participate in classroom
discussions.33 This creates difficulties for Chinese students, since a key aspect of
graduate education involves constant discussions, debates, and collaborations with
fellow students. This nature of graduate education puts additional stress on Chinese
students, both men and women, who have difficulty communicating in American
classroom settings. The women I interviewed said that the most difficulty was with
talking about their ideas in front of a group of people. As one woman physical
scientist put it, “I am always afraid that my ideas are not good enough and I also
have trouble explaining them in the most precise and appealing way.”
As noted, Chinese students’ classroom behavior is deeply rooted in the
Confucian-oriented educational philosophy where it is considered disrespectful to
raise questions to the teacher directly in the classroom. Overcoming this becomes
even more difficult if the teachers and students have trouble speaking to each other
and understanding each other’s accents. Language difficulties negatively affect
not only students’ confidence in speaking up in classrooms but also their levels of
understanding about certain reading materials and research papers, difficulties that
are compounded by the habit of not asking questions when there is something they
do not understand.34 In case of confusion, their preference is to clarify by speaking
to classmates after class.35

SOCIAL RELATIONS AND HOLIDAYS

One key aspect of the challenges that Chinese students face relates to social
relations with people from another culture. In his cultural study of Chinese graduate

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students, Wang identified the major indicators that reflect different levels of social
relations: “isolation, arising from a feeling of exclusion from class activities
and a sense of segregation from native students, and exacerbated by prejudiced
attitudes encountered.”36 Feng attributed Chinese students’ hesitation to participate
in social activities in North American universities to the fact that they did not
share the same  holiday traditions as American students. The lack of participation
in American  holidays caused further difficulties for Chinese students in making
American friends.37
In the case of Chinese women students in science and engineering, much of the
social relations gap is caused by a lack of cultural understanding, cultural stereotypes,
and different social habits. Socially, many Chinese students do not feel comfortable
attending social activities as they do not know many of the cultural customs and
references to pop culture that are often used in informal social settings. For example,
some Chinese students refuse to go to a colleague’s birthday party because they are
afraid of being made fun of if their English is not perfect. In some cases, these women
are excluded from being invited to social activities, as they become perceived as the
unsocial “nerds” in the department who should not be invited to social outings.
This creates a vicious cycle: the less opportunity Chinese women students have to
socialize with American students in informal settings, the less likely they will build
up enough confidence in their linguistic skills, cultural understanding, and their
ability to express their views and share their research ideas in more formal research
settings. Some American students take advantage of this vulnerability to appropriate
the Chinese students’ ideas without giving them any credit. The Chinese women
scientists and engineering students I interviewed repeatedly reported that their ideas
were taken by male colleagues through informal conversations and presented at
research group meetings.
This pattern persisted after the women entered the workforce. In face, some of
the women who had only recently entered the private sector reported even more
troublesome incidents of male colleagues taking their ideas as their own.

DISADVANTAGES AND EXPLOITATION OF CHINESE WOMEN STUDENTS

These historical and cultural philosophies and traditions have no doubt put Chinese-
born students in the U.S. at a disadvantage when it comes to social interactions
and scholarly conversations. These problems, paired with financial situations
and language insufficiency, create many difficulties and cause much anxiety and
dissatisfaction among Chinese students in the U.S.38
Throughout the course of my ethnographic encounters with Chinese women
scientists and engineers, I observed that some American professors and collaborators
had taken advantage of the tradition of “respecting authority” and exploited these
women. This kind of exploitation takes various forms. First, it may take the form
of doctoral students doing the majority of the research work but not including
their names on publications. The common excuses from advisers were: “You are

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not experienced enough. You need to get more under your belt before you can
publish” and “You are not familiar with the American way of publishing yet.”
Second, some professors tell Chinese women students that they cannot question
anything that they are asked to do because they do not know much and they are not
familiar with the American system of higher education. Third, occasionally some
doctoral advisers threaten to cut funding or their visa sponsorship in order to make
the Chinese women work overtime, making them believe less of themselves and
allowing the advisers to maintain 100 percent control over them. More frequently
seen is American professors putting their Chinese students on the spot at group
meetings and asking them to explain everything that is “Chinese”-related. These
kinds of racially charged classroom interactions were observed during most of my
days of fieldwork.
Yet, few if any of these women have stood up to their advisers and told them
to stop, due to the fear of consequences. Several of the women interviewed used a
Chinese phrase to describe this situation gan nu bu gan yan (敢怒不敢言), which
translates as “only dare to get angry but do not dare to speak up.”39
Li and Stodolska found in their study on Chinese graduate students in the U.S. that
recent Chinese graduate students were less likely to follow a traditional immigrants’
path of assimilation but leaned towards temporary adaptation.40 They were willing
to sacrifice their social life in the U.S. in order to achieve more academically and
scholarly and have a better life after graduation. Thus their acculturation process is
unlikely to improve over time.
I have found visas and security restrictions to be a significant handicap and
barrier for all foreign students and scholars working in the sciences or with modern
technology at all, not just Chinese women. In the United States it is very difficult
for foreign nationals to get permission to work on sensitive or classified projects. It
limits them at all stages, from working on many of their professors’ projects while
they are in school to establishing future contacts and entrées to career avenues. This
significantly reduces job prospects. If they are allowed to work on these projects their
roles are usually limited, sometimes to mere clerical support. And this has the side
effect of significantly limiting funding sources, both in school and professionally,
thus creating a snowball effect that reverberates throughout their careers.

ADULTHOOD AND MARRIAGE

The vast majority of Chinese-born women graduate students I studied were younger
than their American counterparts. They mostly came to the U.S. directly after
graduating from colleges in China, where nearly all of the undergraduate population
is in their late teens or early twenties; unlike in the U.S., where nearly a third of the
college students are non-traditional students.41 Chinese universities are filled with
young students who are not ready to take on adult responsibilities, such as marriage,
financial independence, parenthood, etc.42

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It is important to point out that the criteria of adulthood are drastically different
between Chinese and American cultures. Adulthood in Chinese culture is more likely
to be defined by increased obligations to others instead of individual transitions.43
One common and prevalent challenge faced by the majority of the Chinese students
in this study resulted from the Chinese definition of adulthood. Many graduate
students were frustrated by the lack of opportunity to fulfill their obligations related
to career growth, financial independence, and ability to take care of aging parents.
Additionally, marriage is considered a strong indicator of adulthood. Chinese
parents expect their children to get married before the age of 30. This poses additional
challenges for many Chinese graduate students in the U.S.44 Single women older than
30 are called sheng nü (剩女), or leftover women.45 This term is highly derogatory
and is a direct indication of societal bias towards women who are career-oriented.
There is no equivalent of such a term for men who are older than 30 – another sign
of unequal gender norms and treatment in Chinese culture.
Many women science and engineering students are stuck in the limbo stage
that stops them from transitioning into adulthood: On one hand, they are highly
successful individuals who graduated from top Chinese research universities and
were admitted into top U.S. science and engineering programs. On the other hand,
they are bogged down by the societal pressure of finding the right partner before
the age of 30, advancing their careers and finding a great job, being able to take
care of their aging parents, and becoming financially independent. Under the
constraints of time, finance, age, and visa issues, Chinese women students are under
immense pressure and often have great difficulties assuming adult responsibilities.
Many of them struggle with jobs upon graduation. They receive minimal help from
their doctoral advisers or the institutions that they call home in coping with their
difficulties.
After entering the workforce, Chinese women are underpaid compared to their
American peers, yet have no right to negotiate, and they are running the risk of
being rejected by the Chinese job market if they return to China past the age of 35.
Due to a lack of friends and limited access to social networks, many Chinese women
scientists and engineers are left to struggle with these circumstances on their own.
Sadly, very few formal resources and programs are in place to assist Chinese women
to overcome or cope with these challenges.

CHINA’S INVESTMENT IN SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING

National pride was consistently demonstrated by both young and more senior
Chinese women scientists and engineers, and they were especially proud of China’s
gains in science and technology. They largely attributed this sense of pride to
China’s rapid economic growth and its aggressive funding schemes in science and
engineering development. Many American scientists were very interested in this
topic yet usually did not know how to go about asking questions. I often heard

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American postdocs approach Chinese scientists to ask questions like, “I heard China
is investing a lot of money in scientific research” or “How can we collaborate to get
some Chinese funding?” My observations indicated that many Chinese scientists
and engineers were stunned by these direct questions and usually did not know how
to answer them. They usually ended up offering a very simplistic answer or simply
did not know what to say. This kind of reaction was misread by American postdocs.
One postdoc from chemical engineering once revealed to me, “It doesn’t seem that
they [the Chinese postdocs] want to share their funding secrets!”
What these American postdocs did not know is that science and engineering
research funding distribution and allocation in China is quite different than in the
U.S. In China it is a very complex network-based process and is not always balanced
between disciplines. Some of the funding has very stringent requirements in terms
of institutional types, whether they are international collaborations, the nature of the
projects, or research teams’ qualifications.
Funding for research currently comes from the central government, which consults
with several committees of the nation’s top scientists and engineers to decide on
research priorities. These committees are not openly recruited and nearly all consist
of older male members. The research and development investments in China are
industry heavy – only 10 percent of all the research and development funding goes
into universities.46 Chinese policy strongly favors science and engineering over
social science and humanities research, and thus largely overlooks the importance of
studying the ways in which “cultures” or “strategies” among scientists affect their
collaboration and knowledge transmission process.
Since 1999, China’s investment on research and development has been increasing
by 20 percent each year. In fact, China is currently at an early stage of one of the
world’s most ambitious programs of scientific research investment, similar to the
situation in the U.S. during the 1950s and 1960s at the beginning of the Space Age
and Kennedy’s commitment to reaching the moon.47 In late 2006, China moved
past Japan for the first time and became the world’s largest investor in research
and development after the U.S. In fact, in 2006, China established a 15-year-long
science and engineering development plan whose goal is to boost annual research
and development investment by 2.5 percent until the year 2020.48
There are several key reasons for China’s decision to largely invest in research
and development. First, China is determined to become independent when it comes
to innovation and scientific discoveries. Policymakers see that it is no longer safe to
merely rely on imported technologies, especially when it comes to national security-
related technologies. More importantly, in the Chinese scientists’ own opinions,
is that China is trying to become the leader in global scientific discoveries.49
However, they all mentioned that regardless of the abundant monetary investment
and world-class labs, new research laboratories and interdisciplinary research
teams were strong in yingjian (硬件), or hardware, yet very weak in ruanjian
(软件), or software. This case particularly refers to culture, training and collaboration
strategies, and communications strategies.

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Many male Chinese scientists have considered themselves as being responsible

for shouldering the responsibilities of learning the most advanced ways to manage a
research project, to communicate and work with interdisciplinary and transnational
teams, and to allocate funds in order to maximize outcomes from the Chinese
government’s investment. However, these seemingly patriotic and nearly self-
imposed responsibilities were rarely discussed among the Chinese women scientists
and engineers. They were more likely to express their appreciation of how much
China’s fast economic growth has benefited them as a Chinese person studying and
working in the U.S. in the sense that they face less overall discrimination.

ACADEMIC CORRUPTION AND DISHONESTY

Despite all of the challenges that Chinese women are facing in today’s American
science and engineering programs, they point out that at least one aspect of American
academia made them feel at ease – freedom from (or at least a minimal amount of)
academic corruption. Serger and Breidne made some observations on corruption in
Chinese academia:
Academic corruption is a serious problem receiving increasing attention;
beyond plagiarism, critics have identified that academic abuse is undermining
not only the quality of China’s academic system but also, more generally, the
stability of the China’s social and economic fabric. Examining the academic
evaluation system, Liu Ming, a prominent Chinese scholar, notes that academic
corruption – which includes nepotism, bribery, and the exchange of favors to
influence the appointment of academic positions or the distribution of research
funds – differs significantly from other forms of corruption.50
Many Chinese women scientists cited academic corruption as one of the top
reasons stopping them from returning to China, especially in academia.

NOTES
1
Keith Bradsher, “Next Made-in-China Boom: College Graduates,” New York Times, January 16,
2013,  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/17/business/chinas-ambitious-goal-for-boom-in-college-
graduates.html
2
Bradsher, “Next Made-in-China Boom.”
3
Bradsher, “Next Made-in-China Boom.” China does not have community colleges. The two-year
colleges are called dazhuan or 大专. The literal translation is “higher learning of specialization.”
These institutions are usually public two-year vocational schools that admit students who cannot
enroll in four-year universities due to their lower grades on the Chinese National Higher Education
Entrance Exam. Unlike community colleges in the U.S. and Canada, these two-year colleges have no
transfers to four-year colleges. They serve the purpose of vocational schools.
4
The Chinese Ministry of Education does not release official data on college graduates’ disciplines.
I made inquiries to the Chinese Ministry of Education and many other related offices but could not
get any answers. The Chinese educational system requires students to choose their general disciplines
during the second year in high school. Students can either go into “文史” (social sciences/history) or
“理工” (physical sciences and engineering). When they take the college entrance exam, their major

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is largely already determined. Once entering college, it is extremely difficult to change majors. Thus,
I used the statistics on entering college students’ discipline breakdown to predict college graduates’
disciplines.
5
M. Miao and Y. Ding, “China Moves to Solve Graduate Unemployment Issue,” China View (2009),
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-01/11/content_10639139.htm (accessed June 2, 2015).
6
See interview with Professor Joseph Cheng from City University of Hong Kong with BBC News.
“What Do You Do with Millions of Extra Graduates?” by Yojana Sharma, http://www.bbc.com/news/
business-28062071 (accessed June 2, 2015).
7
Chinese Ministry of Education, “Educational Statistics: 2010, 2013,” http://www.moe.gov.cn/
publicfiles/business/htmlfiles/moe/moe_2795/ (accessed June 12, 2015).
8
See Li Mei and Yang Rui, “Governance Reforms in Higher Education: A Study of China,” in
International Institute for Educational Planning, UNESCO, 2014, http://unesdoc.unesco.org/
images/0023/002318/231858e.pdf (accessed September 12, 2015).
9
See Ruth Hayhoe, China’s Universities and the Open Door (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1989).
10
See Guo, “Comparison of Government Financial Aid on University Academic Research Among Three
Countries,” Tsinghua Journal of Education 3 (2010): 47–54.
11
See Guo, “Comparison of Government Financial Aid.”
12
See Keith Bradsher, “Next Made-in-China Boom.”
13
The National Higher Education Entrance Examination (also translated as National Matriculation
Examination or National College Entrance Examination or “NCEE”), commonly known as Gaokao
(高考, “Higher Education Exam”), is an academic examination held annually in the People’s Republic
of China. This examination is a prerequisite for entrance into almost all higher education institutions at
the undergraduate level. It is usually taken by students in their last year of senior high school, although
there has been no age restriction since 2001.
14
See Lu Meiyi, “The Awakening of Chinese Women and the Women’s Movement in the Early Twentieth
Century,” in Holding Up Half the Sky: Chinese Women Past, Present, and Future, eds. Tao Jie, Zheng
Bijun, and Shirley Mow (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2004).
15
Jane Liu and Marilyn Carpenter, “Trends and Issues of Women’s Education in China,” The Clearing
House 78, no. 6 (2005): 277–281.
16
Liu and Carpenter, “Trends and Issues.”
17
Thomas P. Bernstein, Up to the Mountains and Down to the Villages: The Transfer of Youth from
Urban to Rural China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).
18
Susan L. Shirk, Competitive Comrades: Career Incentives and Student Strategies in China (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1982).
19
Mark Sidel, “Graduate Education in the People’s Republic of China: New Steps, New Challenges,”
Higher Education 12, no. 2 (1983): 155–170.
20
See Sidel, “Graduate Education.”
21
See Sidel, “Graduate Education.”
22
Chinese Ministry of Education, “Educational Statistics: 2010, 2013.”
23
Chinese parents do not let their children work part-time jobs while they are in school to earn
allowances. Some scholars argue that this is one of the consequences of the one-child policy. Parents
are spending all their money and energy on their children, and in return they expect their children to
spend 100 percent of their time on studying and improving their grades.
24
Ying Huang, “Transitioning Challenges Faced by Chinese Graduate Students,” Adult Learning 23, no.
3 (2012): 138–147.
25
Robert A. Rhoads and Diane Yu Gu, “A Gendered Point of View on the Challenges of Women
Academics in The People’s Republic of China,” Higher Education 63 (2011): 733–750.
26
Women who are “married and already had one child” are referred to as yi hun yi yu or 已婚已育 in
Mandarin. This group of women is considered by many Chinese higher education institutions to be the
most scholarly productive and least distracted by their marriage and pregnancy.
27
Jin and Cortazzi, “Changing Practices in Chinese Cultures of Learning.”
28
R. G. Tweed and D. R. Lehman, “Learning Considered Within a Cultural Context: Confucian and
Socratic Approaches,” The American Psychologist 57, no. 2 (2002): 89–99.

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 THE INFLUENCE OF CHINESE ACADEMIA AND CULTURE

29
See Leng Hui, “Chinese Cultural Schema of Education: Implications for Communication between
Chinese Students and Australian Educators,” Issues in Educational Research 15, no. 1 (2005): 17–36.
30
Hui, “Chinese Cultural Schema of Education.”
31
Thomas A. Upton, “Chinese Students, American Universities, and Cultural Confrontation,”
MinneTESOL Journal 7 (1989): 9–28.
32
Hui, “Chinese Cultural Schema of Education,” 26.
33
Upton, “Chinese Students, American Universities, and Cultural Confrontation.”
34
Yan Wang, “Pursuing Cross-Cultural Graduate Education: A Multifaceted Investigation,” International
Education 33, no. 2 (2004): 52–72.
35
Jinyan Huang and Don Klinger, “Chinese Graduate Students at North American Universities: Learning
Challenges and Coping Strategies,” Comparative and International Education / Éducation Comparée
et Internationale 35, no. 2 (2006): 48–61.
36
Wang, “Pursuing Cross-Cultural Graduate Education,” 52.
37
Jianhua Feng, “The Adaptation of Students from the People’s Republic of China to an American
Academic Culture, “ Report (March 20, 1991), http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED329833 (accessed March 22,
2015).
38
Tweed and Lehman, “Learning Considered within a Cultural Context.”
39
A Chinese phrase used to describe someone of a lower class or at a disadvantaged position who is
experiencing negative things but cannot speak up. This is largely due to a fear of being penalized by
the consequences.
40
Monica Z. Li and Monika Stodolska. “Transnationalism, Leisure, and Chinese Graduate Students in
the United States,” Leisure Sciences 28, no. 1 (2006): 39–55.
41
Huang, “Transitioning Challenges.”
42
Carol Kasworm, “Adult Meaning Making in The Undergraduate Classroom,” Adult Education
Quarterly 53, no. 2 (2003): 81–98.
43
Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, “Learning to Stand Alone: The Contemporary American Transition to Adulthood
in Cultural and Historical Context,” Human Development 41, no. 5–6 (1998): 295–315.
44
Kun Yan and David C. Berliner, “Chinese International Students in the United States: Demographic
Trends, Motivations, Acculturation Features and Adjustment Challenges,” Asia Pacific Education
Review 12, no. 2 (2011): 173–184.
45
Lena Hong Fincher, Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China (Zed Books:
Bucharest, 2014).
46
See Marginson, “Higher Education in East Asia and Singapore.”
47
James Wilsdon, “China: The Next Science Superpower?”, Engineering Technology 2, no. 3 (1997):
28–31.
48
Wilsdon, “China: The Next Science Superpower?”
49
Wilsdon, “China: The Next Science Superpower?”
50
Sylvia Schwaag Serger and Magnus Breidne, “China’s Fifteen-Year Plan for Science and Technology:
An Assessment,” Asia Policy 4, no. 1 (2007): 135–164, doi:10.1353/asp.2007.0013.

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 CHAPTER 6

AMERICAN ACADEMIA
Doctoral Programs

The drastically changing and increasingly diverse science and engineering workforce
directly impacts U.S. science and engineering education policy and its international
competitiveness in cutting edge research and intellectual exchange. This workforce
has its roots in American academia, where students from all over the world come
to study and begin their careers. In this light, in studying foreign-born women’s
careers in American academia in the science and engineering fields, it is essential
to understand American academic culture, funding, and history. For many Chinese-
born women, doctoral programs provide platforms for their first interactions with
American academic and social cultures, and what happens there in large part sets the
tone for the rest of their professional lives.
A high percentage of U.S. science and engineering programs consist of
international students.1 For example, as of 2013, over 70 percent of all American
electrical engineering graduate students were international. The number is also very
high in computer science, industrial engineering, and other fields of engineering and
the physical sciences (see Table 1).
Before delving into an examination of doctoral education in the U.S., a seemingly
simple, yet crucial, question needs to be answered: What is the purpose of the PhD?
The establishment of the first doctoral program in the U.S. prompted this question,
but scholars have still not reached a consensus. A widely referenced definition
offered by the Council of Graduate Schools stated, “The PhD program is designed
to prepare a student to become a scholar, that is, to discover, integrate, and apply
knowledge, as well as communicate the disseminate it.”2
Doctoral programs are designed to train the next generation of scholars to be
capable of conducting independent and innovative research.3 However, with the
emergent influence of the global knowledge economy, doctoral education is also
viewed as a knowledge factory that equips students with the skills necessary to
participate in the new knowledge industries.4 The latter point is especially explicit in
career paths among science and engineering doctoral students, as many graduates are
now choosing to go into non-academic professions since there are more opportunities
in the private sector for these students than for most of the others. Besides the obvious
need for technologists in numerous areas, the skills these students possess are in high
demand in the financial industry.
Golde and Dore’s large-scale interdisciplinary study on doctoral students’
experiences revealed that the vast majority of science and engineering doctoral

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students were not receiving sufficient knowledge and training to prepare them for
the workforce upon graduation. On the students’ part, the study also showed that
“many students do not clearly understand what doctoral study entails, how the
process works, and how to navigate it effectively.”5
Stolzenberg found that among doctoral students from various disciplines,
engineering doctoral students (28 percent) were the least likely to choose an
academic career, felt significantly more exploited, and received significantly less
positive feedback from their faculty advisers. She also suggested that qualitative
research on this topic could “add depth to studies on the personal and professional
aspects of the advising relationship.”6

Table 1. Full-time engineering graduate and international students by field (2013)

Field Percentage of Number of Full-time Number of

International Graduate Students – Full-time Graduate
Students International Students – U.S.

Electrical Engineering 70.3 21,073 8,904

Computer Science 63.2 20,710 12,072
Industrial Engineering 60.4   5,057   3,314
Chemical Engineering 53.4   4,012   3,504
Materials Engineering 52.1   2,660   2,891
Mechanical Engineering 50.2   8,352   8,273

Source: N
 ational Foundation for American Policy: The Importance of International Students
to America, 2013.7

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW OF AMERICAN GRADUATE SCHOOLS

Following the German model of postgraduate education, the founding of Johns

Hopkins University in 1876, with the objective of connecting higher education
with scientific research, set an historical milestone marking the beginning of
graduate education in the U.S.8 The implementation of the Morrill Acts of
1862 and 1890, which provided land grants to establish colleges in each state,
significantly encouraged the development of graduate education. Graduate schools
began to emerge in different forms all across the country. These ranged from
entirely new universities (e.g., Stanford in 1891 and The University of Chicago
in 1892) to graduate components added to existing research universities (e.g.,
Harvard and Columbia), to expanded research functions of the state universities
(e.g., the universities of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois).9 By 1900 the number of
PhD granting institutions in the U.S. had grown to fourteen, which awarded a total
of 300 PhDs that year. Graduate education began to thrive due to strong government
involvement, philanthropic support, and organized, active research.10

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After World War II, the G.I. Bill created a demand for additional colleges and
universities to serve the returning veterans.11 In 1957, Sputnik was launched by the
Russians, which spurred widespread initiatives addressing what was perceived as an
American deficiency in science, engineering, and advanced technology. Significant
efforts were made to expand education in science at all school levels, from
elementary to graduate schools. The success of the U.S. space program during the
1960s, culminating with the Apollo landing on the moon in 1969, further encouraged
interest and investment in science and technology.
Nowhere has the growth in higher education been more evident than in California,
which has created hundreds of new institutions, public and private, of higher learning
since World War II. And nowhere else better illustrates the confluence of higher
education and private industry than Silicon Valley, adjacent to Stanford, Berkeley,
and the many colleges and universities throughout the Bay Area, where both have
grown in a symbiotic relationship. It is notable that, unlike many areas, California
has both strong public and private universities, creating a very viable and flexible
structure that has proven very efficient. In particular, this system has attracted
talented scientists, engineers, and technologists from all over the world, making
California the world’s greatest vortex for technology.
In response to the postwar baby boom, in 1960 California launched its Master
Plan for Higher Education, which set ambitious goals of a widespread higher
educational system, including community colleges, state colleges, and the
University of California, that would offer higher education to all at very low cost.
At the highest level, University of California campuses such as Los Angeles and
Berkeley were expanded and several new ones were created, including Santa Cruz,
Riverside, Irvine, and San Diego. This was accompanied by the creation of dozens
of community and state colleges, creating a feeder system that encouraged students
to pursue graduate studies.
The California state colleges did not originally offer graduate programs, just four-
year undergraduate degrees. However, with time came significant pressure to upgrade
them, and in 1972 they were renamed state universities, and began offering graduate
programs. This resulted in the creation of hundreds of new doctoral programs in
diverse subjects, including all fields of science and engineering.
This was the largest and most systematic expansion of institutions of higher
learning in history, and it has been extremely successful. Many people credit
California’s dominance in higher technology to the strong support for higher
education. And the growth in public institutions of higher education in California has
been accompanied by a parallel growth in private ones. There are now hundreds of
different kinds of PhD-granting private schools in the state, of all sizes, ranging from
small colleges and smaller but prestigious centers such as the Claremont colleges to
giants such as Stanford, USC and Caltech, all three of which are world-class centers
for the study of science and engineering, and technology in general.
For a period, the concerns of college access for the baby-boomer generation
outweighed the interests in scientific research.12 The emergence of student movements

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in the 1960s and 1970s also encouraged universities to conduct more “practical”
research, the results of which could be used directly to benefit society. During the
mid-1970s, however, due to economic pressures, the growth rate of public funding
for academic research began to slow. Global market forces, primarily meaning
corporate funding, began to play a greater role, both in the form of increased funding
for universities’ research programs as well as the establishment of corporate research
and development centers.13 Private foundations also began to play a more prominent
role. These trends have continued in recent decades, and accelerated in the wake of
the Great Recession.

DOCTORAL PROGRAMS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Due to the increase in undergraduate enrollment and the societal needs for practical
research, U.S. universities presently face an increasing number of difficulties in
supporting graduate education.14 These problems have been greatly aggravated by
the impact of the Great Recession, which has resulted in severely decreased public
funding and substantial increases in tuition at both public and private schools.
People have begun to raise questions about the quality of graduate education, the
decreasing amount of pay faculty receive, reductions in basic research funding,
and the job market for junior faculty members, which has become dismal. There
are fewer tenured positions available and more competition for them, and a strong
trend towards hiring instructors on short-term contracts. Many scholars regard this
situation as the indicator of the end of a “golden age of American higher education”
that began in the 1960s.
As a result, more and more universities have shifted or are shifting from a basic
research paradigm to a focus on applied research projects.15 In order to attract
more funding, relationships between research universities and various industries
have become more extensive, and more intimate as well, especially in the fields of
engineering and applied sciences.16 These relationships are further encouraged by
faculty wishing to pursue lucrative opportunities, who often work as consultants or
contractors for private firms, and sometimes even found their own firms.
The increasing interest and demand for doctoral education from consumers has
resulted in a growing number of science and engineering doctoral students and an
ever-increasing number of doctoral programs. However, the increasing number of
doctoral students, decreasing support in graduate education, shifting demographics,
and the dramatically shrinking number of academic positions poses serious
employment issues for the present generation of doctoral students.17 An authoritative
and large-scale national study conducted by the COSEPUP in 1995 triggered an
outcry for reshaping and reforming U.S. doctoral education to “meet the country’s
varied needs for scientists and engineers” in the rapidly changing global political
economy.18
Geiger pointed out that a “prestige hierarchy” existed among various science and
engineering doctoral programs, leading to a disturbing phenomenon: “The PhD as it

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stands today represents too much training for many potential consumers of graduate
education; yet it is too little training for its traditional role of preparing future
faculty.”19 Confirming this, Golde and Dore’s large-scale, interdisciplinary survey
study on doctoral students’ experiences revealed significant problems with today’s
doctoral education. The study found that “the training doctoral students receive is
not what they want, nor does it prepare them for the jobs they take.” On the students’
part, the study showed that “many students do not clearly understand what doctoral
study entails, how the process works, and how to navigate it effectively.”20
In Paths to the Professoriate, Austin and Wulff summarized the current challenges
that doctoral education faces: it fails to effectively fulfill its responsibilities to
employers, it does not sufficiently prepare students for the world in which they will
work, and it does not efficiently meet changing societal, national, and global needs.21
Although all doctoral programs and institutions face the aforementioned
challenges, they vary drastically among disciplines due to the goal of training students
to be independent scholars and researchers more in the humanities as compared to
the sciences. Scientists work in laboratories and are constantly collaborating with
colleagues. In Clark’s The Research Foundations of Graduate Education, Gumport
emphasized the disciplinary differences in achieving these goals of doctoral
education. She stated that “different disciplinary interpretations of research training
prevail. Most common are the laboratory-intensive apprenticeship model of the
sciences and the library-intensive individualistic model of the humanities.”22
Under the principles of the apprenticeship model, science and engineering
doctoral education is now primarily characterized by two major factors: doctoral
students’ active and frequent participation in professors’ research projects and
collaboration with other professors, researchers, and fellow students; and abundant
research funding to ensure the “hardware (research labs, facilities, and equipment)”
and “software (computing software, doctoral student funding, team collaborations)”
necessary for productive and time sensitive research.23
Gardner’s study of 60 doctoral students from six different disciplines in the
humanities, social sciences, physical sciences, and engineering revealed fairly
common themes of students’ socialization experiences: support, self-direction,
ambiguity, and transition.24 However, “the degree of dynamics of the experience
discussed varied by departments with higher or lower completion rates.”25 Gardner
found that, as students of the departments with “lower completion rates,” mathematics
and engineering doctoral students were more likely than those in other disciplines to
depend on faculty members for support, primarily because these disciplines require
access to laboratories and sophisticated equipment that other fields do not. She noted
that these two departments happened to have a high percentage of international
students and that international students were more likely to seek help and directions
from faculty members rather than peers. She found that supportive student-faculty
mentoring relationships, or the lack of them, was one of the major reasons for high
and low completion rates at department levels. However, this study failed to establish
any direct connections between mentoring relationships and students’ socialization

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experiences. Additionally, socialization experiences caused by gender differences

were not a consideration in the study’s design.
In a mixed-methods study of over 200 women doctoral students in education,
Maher, Ford, and Thompson found that four major factors contributed to women
doctoral students’ degree progress: viable and stable funding; the presence of an
involved and supportive adviser; opportunities to participate in major research
projects; and health, family, and marital stability.26 Others have also identified the
first three factors as the key to science and engineering graduate education.27
Women doctoral students are found to be more likely than males to encounter
difficulties and challenges in their graduate school socialization process, particularly
in their relationships with faculty, who are generally male.28 In Herzig’s study on
doctoral women in mathematics, both women doctoral students and the department
faculty members were interviewed.29 The findings showed that all of the women
students had negative or limited relationships with faculty. These relationships took
various forms such as “feeling invisible, needing guidance, wanting better teaching,
lacking moral support and wishing to be mentored.”30

FINANCE AND FUNDING

The majority of the Chinese women interviewed for this study came to the
U.S. through a partial or full university scholarship. These scholarships have
some strings attached. First, these women have to keep up with a high level of
academic performance reflected by their GPAs or the number of high impact
journal publications. More importantly, the validity of the scholarship is based
on visa sponsorship from their doctoral programs. However, due to the lack of
administrative supervision from these science and engineering programs, the
decisions regarding whether to continue sponsoring these students’ visas is entirely
handled by their doctoral advisers. Some male advisers use visa sponsorship as
leverage to make Chinese women work overtime and give them minimal credit
for the work they have done. In a few cases, Chinese women students were stuck
in sexual harassment situations they were not able to report to the authorities due
to the fear of being denied their visa sponsorship. They consequently lost their
scholarships and jeopardized their future careers.
Difficulties with funding impacted their decisions to pursue academic careers.
Szelényi’s study on biological and physical sciences doctoral students and faculty
revealed that a major part of faculty identities, prominence, and success in these fields
was based on the ability to provide monetary resources for their doctoral students
and research laboratories.31 Szelényi found that this kind of funding-based identity
differed by discipline. For example, scholars in the chemical engineering division
experienced a higher rate of collaboration with biological sciences departments and
were more likely to follow similar lab-based research practices as some biological
fields. However, aerospace engineering was more closely related to the fields of
astronomy and the physical sciences and focused more on instrumentation, data

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coding, and analysis. Thus, their funding was more likely to come from the military
and national defense agencies.
Szelényi’s study revealed that women perceived themselves to be more likely
than their male counterparts to question their own ability to secure external funding
if they became faculty members.32 One of the women in physical sciences that I
interviewed shared her fears regarding this problem:
I see that professors have to get their own funding. I feel that I don’t have what
my adviser has. They have a love for what they do and to get funding you have
to be creative. It’s not enough to be just knowledgeable. You have to think
outside of the box and I just don’t have that skill set. So I cannot imagine me
being a good professor in the future. Being a good professor is not just about
teaching anymore. I feel like the part of getting funding is the most important
element and that scares me.
This participant’s concerns regarding research funding revealed an increasingly
common characteristic for research universities – namely the reliance on faculty
to secure funding from the government and private sector; and hence looking for
this ability in prospective hires. However, the training for these types of skills and
knowledge was reported as missing from many students’ doctoral programs. The
Chinese women doctoral students in this study were rarely involved in any grant
writing activities during their entire graduate education. In addition, regardless of
their ability to write grants, as foreigners these women also faced visa constraints in
applying for grants from NASA and the military due to national security concerns.
Unfortunately, these sources represent a large part of the available funding in the
physical sciences and engineering.
On the national level, the U.S. Department of Defense and the Chinese People’s
Liberation Army are the world’s largest employers of scientists and engineers. Many
contemporary technological and scientific innovations and development utilize
classified information. The two countries’ competition in national defense and
military further unfairly hinders average Chinese scientists’ and engineers’ career
potential in the U.S. and in China.
Chinese women begin their scientific careers in the U.S. with minimal training
and understanding of the funding structures, sources, and strategies necessary
to write grant proposals. Because of these constraints, many of the women
consequently shied away from many academic positions as they did not feel
confident or comfortable with a key aspect of being a faculty member – funding
applications. While the lack of training in grant application activities might affect
both women and men, I focused on the unique strategies that women have used
to cope with this kind of challenge. One successful strategy was simply to go
into private industry. One of the fifth-year students compared funding situations
in industry to academia and stated that industry has more abundant financial
resources for a researcher/scientist to fully utilize her skills to apply scientific
knowledge to products.

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Additionally, a student interviewed described her reservations about the stress

that she would face in terms of securing constant funding to maintain her labs
and support doctoral students. She admitted that pressure from having to support
graduate students alone could make her avoid academic positions. Several women
interviewed expressed interest in academic careers that only entailed teaching
responsibilities. A civil engineering student’s comment explained the reasons why
she did not want to become a professor at a research university:
I don’t like the idea of funding graduate students and always having to write
grants and trying to have a family. I have seen my adviser try to raise kids
while doing all that and it was very tough on her. Having a family is very
important to me. So, I just think it would be less demanding to be a professor
at a research university like this [Tier One research universities].
The national statistics show that women were more likely to be employed part-
time than in full-time tenure positions in the science and engineering workforce.33
This student’s perception of the difficulties of pursuing an academic career could be
a contributing factor to this phenomenon. Several other participants also regarded
community colleges and teaching institutions as more beneficial when it came to
balancing work and personal life.
Several male professors I spoke to discussed their observations throughout the
years regarding the top two reasons that stop women doctoral students from pursuing
academic careers, which one professor summarized:
It [career aspirations] evolves during the students’ doctoral studies. And very
often I see female students do not want to go into academia. Why they don’t
want to go into academia? First several years of academia, you have to put
in very hard work and raise money to support students. That’s a tough part
in some sense. Also, most women want to raise a family but having a family
delays their tenure process. So they opt to go to industry. I’ve been teaching
here for many years and most of my PhD women students ended up going to
the industry.
This male faculty’s perception was not unique among all of the male faculty
interviewed. Many of them discussed their awareness of women’s concerns regarding
the pressures stemming from the funding aspect of the academic profession. Yet,
none of the male faculty discussed potential approaches to address this major
concern that stops women from pursuing academic careers.
The majority of men attributed women’s decisions to shy away from academia
to their “distractions” from starting a family and concerns over extramural funding.
This viewpoint contrasts with women faculty’s explanations; they were more
likely to acknowledge students’ concerns and then illustrate them with their own
examples and experience. Students interviewed who had had such interactions
with women faculty were less likely to be concerned about the work-life balance
and funding aspects of academic life.

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POSTDOCTORAL ADVENTURES

Compared to other nations in the world, the U.S. spends the most amount of funding
on scientific research, publishes more scientific research articles, and the quality of
these research outcomes is by far the best in the world. Many science and engineering
studies scholars have investigated the background of the scientists and engineers
who have assisted the U.S. in becoming the global leader in scientific research. One
finding was surprising to many policymakers: the U.S. science and engineering
workforce was largely made up of immigrant scientists, many of whom hold
postdoctoral positions. A 2014 Science and Engineering Indicators report published
by the NSF indicated that over 50 percent of all 44,000 postdoctoral positions in
science and engineering were held by foreigners.34
A large percentage of the scientific workforce consists of these highly skilled yet
underpaid scientists and engineers. Foreign postdoctoral researchers are attracted by
the abundant research facilities and infrastructure, as well as by the reputations of the
scientists. They give up lucrative pay for a few years in exchange for long-term career
network and mentorship opportunities. Based on the 2014 Science and Engineering
Indicators report, a science writer noted the key reasons for this phenomenon:
These foreign postdocs, who often initially come to the U.S. as PhD students,
are willing to face an arcane visa process, endure a long separation from their
families, put up with language and cultural barriers, and tolerate weak job
security, all in order to do science at U.S. universities. Foreign postdocs, much
more than their U.S. citizen colleagues, are dependent on the good graces of the
professor they work for. Visa limitations and restrictions on funding for non-
citizen postdocs make it more difficult for foreign postdocs to manage their
career development by switching labs within the university or taking a new
job opportunity elsewhere. This means that, in some cases, foreign postdocs
are exploited.35
Given the significant role postdoctoral positions play in scientists’ and engineers’
career development and the longstanding reputation of U.S. science and engineering
research, the selection for these positions is highly competitive. I found that foreign
postdoctoral candidates were left with little or no room for negotiation. This was
especially true for international women scientists, many of whom felt frustrated
in the process. The professors or respective institutions pay extra money to hire
attorneys and process immigration paperwork in order to get these temporary visa
holders on board. Thus, many of the Chinese women students’ advisers, instead of
playing mentoring roles, have made it clear that in return they expect these women
to work overtime and extra hard to “prove themselves” to be effective scientists.
Some advisers even threatened to stop sponsoring their visas if they did not work
overtime. These women tended to internalize these implicit and explicit threats and
were unlikely to push back or seek additional resources. They were more likely
compared to their counterparts to be grateful to have the opportunity to work in

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a particular professor’s lab and ignore the negative comments or threats from
professors.
Nevertheless, many of the postdocs complete their positions and begin taking
on significant research roles in the U.S or their home countries. In doing so they
help form informal yet well connected global meshworks of scientists who become
linked through their postdoctoral experiences. This point will be revisited and
elaborated on later chapters that discuss the transnational networks in science and
engineering.
Taking multiple postdoctoral positions in the fields of physical sciences is
considered to be a standard practice before a newly-minted PhD lands her or his first
permanent job. Almost all professors and doctoral students in physical sciences have
discussed the necessity to have one or more postdoctoral positions. A professor from
astronomy shared:
I have never seen students not have a postdoc. So postdocs are almost a given
in the field. Most people will go through two postdocs. Some may get away
with doing one. It depends on where they’re aiming for. I think two is the
average. Some will have one, some will have three.
This professor’s statement mirrors the current state of career paths for physical
sciences PhDs. Both student and faculty participants reported that almost all PhD
recipients were doing postdoctoral positions in the “early” stages of their careers.
However, women students in this study believed they were less likely to be mobile
when it came to selecting postdoctoral positions compared to their male counterparts
as they were more willing to sacrifice location for being with a partner or family.
This limitation largely hindered their ability to obtain postdoctoral positions with
prestigious institutions and programs. This forms a vicious cycle where someone
fails to get work on a “quality project” during her first postdoctoral position, and
then usually needs a second, third, or even fourth postdoctoral position to boost
competitiveness for faculty positions. The women in my study reported their
perceptions that they were more likely to be victims of such a cycle.
Many participants regarded postdoctoral positions as an integral part of
doctoral studies. Even if they end up going into industry or a national laboratory,
postdoctoral positions were considered necessary and extremely beneficial when it
came to the competitive job market. A fifth-year student also expressed the common
understanding within the physical sciences community regarding postdoctoral
positions:
I think almost everybody does [a postdoc]. Only the few people just decide to
drop off science entirely or they go into community college teaching don’t do
it. But for the most part, everybody goes to a postdoc. It’s incredibly hard to
get a position without a postdoc. I have not heard of that being done during the
past five years. The postdoc is also necessary if you want a research position.
So at least one postdoc is mandatory if you want to stay in science research.

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Some people do two and some people do three but by the time you get to three
you are seen as the “damaged goods.” The employers would question, “why
don’t you have a permanent job by now?”
This student also discussed the timing for doing a postdoctoral assignment and
how strategic one needs to be to have a smooth transition from doctoral studies to
a postdoctoral position and eventually to a permanent job. A professor in the space
sciences explained why doing a postdoctoral assignment was absolutely necessary
when it came to a career in physical sciences and what the major challenges are that
this group of highly educated scholars face:
In my subject people expect to be postdocs. If we’re talking about grad
students, they all expect to be postdoc. Very few people go into the trouble of
getting a PhD and then go off into something else. I’ve seen that but it’s rare.
So they all want to be postdocs. They want to stay in the academic stream. But
the problem is how do you get out of being a postdoc? There just aren’t enough
academic jobs for the people. And there never were. But it’s worse recently
than it ever was due to funding issues.
The professor’s point reflects a common trend regarding strategies to prepare
doctoral students for a shrinking and competitive academic job market. Almost all
physical sciences faculty participants felt there was a bleak job market for physical
sciences PhD recipients. They argued that they attempt to prepare their students in
two major ways: try to help them publish as much as possible, and try to help them
establish a sufficient network of scholars who can potentially increase possibilities for
obtaining employment opportunities. Yet, Chinese women scientists and engineers
need to overcome a myriad of challenges in order to take on a postdoctoral position.
This is caused by many social, cultural, and policy constraints. This will be further
elaborated on in the chapter on women’s challenges.
The majority of women mentioned their advisers’ flexibility in terms of assisting
their graduating doctoral students with the transition to their first postdoctoral
positions. An engineering doctoral student stated:
Very few do [stay at their doctoral department for postdoc]. I know people who
graduate and they have a postdoc with another institution starting three months
after the graduation. So they will technically be a postdoc with their advisers
for three months. They’ll get paid double but they will be still wrapping things
up with their advisers. It’s nice that sometimes advisers give them that kind of
leeway. I think the advisers appreciate it too because they can get this person
who already knows what’s going on and they’re still paying them as much as
a grad student.
This interviewee regarded such a phenomenon as “a win-win situation” for
both faculty and the graduating doctoral student. This period of time is categorized
as the “separation” period, meaning that it is triggered by significant structural

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or organizational change and/or psychological changes within both mentor and

mentee.36
Several of the professors who were interviewed summarized three common
factors that trigger the start of the “separation” phase at the time close to students’
doctoral graduation: (a) writing postdoctoral proposals; (b) creating their own
research projects; and (c) learning to be independent scholars who secure their own
funding. As one professor explained:
It gets very challenging towards the end, especially when they’re developing
their postdoc applications. They have to write these proposals and this is the
one proposal I won’t help them much with because it has to be their work. It’s
going to be judged as their work. I will talk to them but I won’t rewrite it or edit
it. So we have conversations about the ideas, the directions, and that’s usually
where the “independent scholar conversation” comes up. I usually advise
my students if they’re going on the academic track is, “you want to be an
expert in your proposal, but it has to be a little different so either you take your
science and you play a different technique or you take your technique and do
a different science.” It’s like stepping-stones to your independence. I actually
find the most talented students often the most challenging ones because they’re
the ones you want to keep collaborating with. But you’re pushing them away
and yet you want to keep collaborating.
This professor was not the only one who had concerns about bringing up the
discussion regarding independence. This pattern was also discussed by some women
student participants who used postdoctoral assignments as a buffer between their
“tedious doctoral studies” and their first job. Some interview participants revealed
that they did not know what their plan was after graduating, but they all knew that
doing a postdoc with a prestigious group was “the right thing to do.” Some attributed
their lack of career planning to the fact that they “went to graduate school because
they didn’t know what to do.”
Others considered a postdoctoral position as a strategic move to boost their
competitiveness in the academic position searching process. However, while
postdoctoral appointments were nearly mandatory for all doctoral students in the
physical sciences programs, this pattern does not seem to be quite as prevalent for
engineering students. While many physical sciences students who chose to pursue
academic careers were able to secure a tenured position upon their graduation, less
than 30 percent of the engineering students interviewed mentioned such an option
as part of the pursuit of academic careers. Doctoral students in certain engineering
specializations reported a higher likelihood of being engaged in industry and
interdisciplinary work. These engineering divisions consisted of, but were not
limited to, chemical engineering and environmental engineering.
When asked about their different mentoring approaches to cater to students’
various career aspirations, several women professors addressed the importance

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of postdoctoral positions and publications for students who want to enter either
academia or industry. A physics professor reflected on her mentoring and
communication styles with her doctoral students:
A lot of it has to do with working on their writing, but I also try to talk to them
about how they’re feeling, and recently two of my students are getting close
to graduation this year. So I have been talking with them quite a bit about
what their plans are. Basically what they need to think about is moving on
to the next step for careers. Very conventional trajectories would be doing a
postdoctoral position but one of my students isn’t 100 percent positive. She is
applying for postdoc but she’s also considering doing a more outreach job. So
we’ve talked about taking that path successfully or how she might continue
that path successfully. Either way, doing a postdoc is important.
This professor’s view was also shared by several other professors in the physical
sciences. A very common practice for doctoral students who are about to graduate,
given the limited job openings for full-time positions, was to pursue a postdoctoral
position. However, while the advisers were expecting students to take a proactive
role in their career preparation, Chinese women students rarely actively searched for
postdoctoral positions, primarily because they lacked confidence in their research
and academic abilities.
While postdoctoral positions may assist new graduates in bettering their research
skills and completing more publications, in some cases they merely serve as a
“buffer” or “temporary shelter” for students who have trouble finding a job after
graduate school. One major benefit of pursuing a postdoctoral researcher position
prior to seeking a permanent position in the U.S. is boosting the quality and quantity
of one’s publications and grant writing. One professor’s comment was representative
among all of the professors interviewed:
I encourage them [postdocs] to publish. I usually engage my students and
postdocs who want to go to academia in grant activities. I also spend a lot of
time discussing what it is like to be a professor with those who are interested.
He further discussed the importance of learning how to create research proposals
for those who are interested in academic careers. As many institutions start to put
more weight on grant seeking activities, he suggested that all students who have a
desire to become professors should start learning these skills early in their graduate
school training.

NOTES
1
See Stuart Anderson, “The Importance of International Students to America,” in NFAP Policy
Brief, July 2013 (Washington, DC: National Foundation for American Policy [NFAP], 2013),
http://www.nfap.com/pdf/New%20NFAP%20Policy%20Brief%20The%20Importance%20of%20
International%20Students%20to%20America,%20July%202013.pdf (accessed May 20, 2015).

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CHAPTER 6

2
Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy, “The Doctor of Philosophy Degree: A Policy
Statement,” in Reshaping the Graduate Education of Scientists and Engineer, 1–3. (Washington, DC:
National Academy Press, 1995), http://www.nap.edu/read/4935/chapter/1
3
Pilar Mendoza and Susan K. Gardner, “The PhD in the United States,” in On Becoming a Scholar:
Socialization and Development in Doctoral Education, eds. Susan K. Gardner and Pilar Mendoza
(Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, 2010).
4
Elka Jones, “Beyond Supply and Demand: Assessing the PhD Job Market,” Occupational Outlook
Quarterly 46 (2003): 22–33.
5
Chris Golde and Timothy Dore, At Cross Purposes: What the Experiences of Today’s Doctoral
Students Reveal about Doctoral Education (Philadelphia: Pew Charitable Trusts, 2001), 3.
6
Ellen Stolzenberg, “The Dynamics of Doctoral Student-Faculty Advising Relationship: A Study
Across Academic Fields” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2006): 185.
7
Anderson, “The Importance of International Students to America.”
8
Patricia Gumport, “Graduate Education and Research: Interdependence and Strain,” in American
Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century: Social, Political, and Economic Challenges, ed. by
Philip G. Altbach, Robert O. Berdahl, and Patricia J. Gumport, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2005): 425–461.
9
Patricia Gumport, “The Contested Terrain of Academic Program Reduction,” Journal of Higher
Education 64 (1993): 283–311.
10
Thelin, A History of American Higher Education.
11
Roger L. Geiger, Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research Universities since World
War II (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2004).
12
Geiger, Research and Relevant Knowledge.
13
Sheila Slaughter and Larry L. Leslie, Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial
University (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
14
Geiger, Research and Relevant Knowledge.
15
Altbach et al., American Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century.
16
Roger L. Geiger, “Doctoral Education: The Short-Term Crisis vs. Long-Term Challenge,” The Review
of Higher Education 20, no. 3 (1997): 239–251.
17
Austin and Wulff, Paths to the Professoriate.
18
Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy, “The Doctor of Philosophy Degree: A Policy
Statement,” 3.
19
Roger L. Geiger, “Doctoral Education: The Short-Term Crisis vs. Long-Term Challenge,” 249.
20
Golde and Dore, At Cross Purposes, 3.
21
Austin and Wulff, Paths to the Professoriate.
22
Patricia Gumport, “Graduate Education and Research Imperatives: Views from American Campuses,”
in The Research Foundations of Graduate Education: Germany, Britain, France, United States,
Japan, ed. Burton Clark (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 263.
23
Clark, Research Foundations.
24
Susan K. Gardner, “Contrasting the Socialization Experiences of Doctoral Students in High- and Low-
Completing Departments: A Qualitative Analysis of Disciplinary Contexts at One Institution,” The
Journal of Higher Education 81 (2010): 69. Also see Chris M. Golde, “The Role of the Department
and Discipline in Doctoral Student Attrition: Lessons from Four Departments,” The Journal of Higher
Education 76 (2005): 669–700.
25
Gardner, “Contrasting the Socialization Experiences,” 69.
26
Michelle A. Maher, Martin E. Ford, and Candace M. Thompson, “Degree Progress of Women Doctoral
Students: Factors that Constrain, Facilitate, and Differentiate,” The Review of Higher Education 27
(2004): 385–408.
27
Clark, Research Foundations; Fox, “Women in Science and Engineering”; Golde and Dore, At Cross
Purposes; Gumport, “The Contested Terrain of Academic Program Reduction”; Michael Nettles,
Three Magic Letters: Getting to PhD (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

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 AMERICAN ACADEMIA

28
Caroline Turner and Judith Rann Thompson, “Socializing Women Doctoral Students: Minority and
Majority Experiences,” Review of Higher Education 16 (1993): 355–370; Maher, Ford, and Thompson,
“Degree Progress of Women Doctoral Students”; Abbe Herzig, “‘Slaughtering this Beautiful Math’:
Graduate Women Choosing and Leaving Mathematics,” Gender and Education 16 (2004): 379–395.
29
Herzig, “‘Slaughtering this Beautiful Math’.”
30
Herzig, “‘Slaughtering this Beautiful Math,’” 384.
31
Katalin Szelényi, “Doctoral Student Socialization in Science and Engineering: The Role of
Commercialization, Entrepreneurialism, and the Research Laboratory” (PhD diss., University of
California, Los Angeles, 2007).
32
Szelényi, “Doctoral Student Socialization in Science and Engineering.”
33
National Science Foundation, “Science and Engineering Indicator: 2012.”
34
National Science Foundation, “Science and Engineering Indicator: 2014,” chapter 3,
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind14/content/chapter-3/chapter-3.pdf
35
Michael White, “How Immigrants Make American Science Great,” Pacific Standard, Feb. 21, 2014,
Science and Engineering Indicators 2014 Report, http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/
immigrants-make-american-science-great-75166 (accessed March 25, 2015).
36
Kathy Kram, Mentoring at Work: Developmental Relationships in Organizational Life (Lanham, MD,
England: University Press of America, 1988).

87
 SECTION III
CHINESE WOMEN’S LIVED EXPERIENCES
 CHAPTER 7

MENTORING AND INFORMAL SOCIALIZATION

Understanding the context of both Chinese and American academia and education
culture sets a solid foundation to investigate Chinese women’s lived experiences in
the U.S. science and engineering environment. The upcoming section, which consists
of Chapters 7 to 11, reveals the unknown side of Chinese women’s experiences in
U.S. science and engineering programs and the workforce. The content not only
delineates these women’s interactions with mentors, and the daily challenges and
institutionalized bias against them, but also describes the strategies they are using to
cope with various problems they face in American academia and workplaces. This
section ends with a discussion on the pros and cons of the Chinese government’s
recent initiatives to attract highly educated Chinese scientists and engineers to return
to China.

MENTORING

The origin of the word “mentor” can be traced back to Greek literature: Homer’s The
Odyssey. When Ulysses decided to go to war, he chose a trusted friend, Mentor, to
serve as guardian and teacher of his son Telemachus. During the long absence of his
father, Telemachus received care, education, protection, and guidance from Mentor.1
Mentoring is the first step in informal socialization and crucial to future
networking. Relationships with mentors during college lead to the establishment
of further relationships with others in the field. This chapter reveals the gap in the
informal socialization process experienced by Chinese women doctoral students
in physical sciences and engineering and its consequences. Mentoring experiences
vary by gender, race, ethnicity, and national culture. Much previous literature has
highlighted the importance of mentoring on women’s career development yet
very few studies have focused on international or Chinese women’s mentoring
experience in science and engineering. Little data captures how it affects women’s
career outcomes and their relationships with their graduate school experiences, or
its impact on future networking within their profession, which is one of the focal
areas for this book.
The design of this study focused on asking powerful yet realistic questions such
as: Do Chinese women have dramatically different mentoring experiences compared
to their American peers and, if so, why? What are the influences of Chinese women’s
positive or negative mentoring experiences on their career development and
decision-making process? How does culture play a role in their graduate education

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experience? How do these mentoring relationships impact their transnational

networks of colleagues?
Many scholars have taken great interest in the study and exploration of
mentoring relationships and there has been considerable research on the subject.
This enthusiasm has created a myriad of studies that broadly and imprecisely define
the term “mentoring” or “mentoring relationship.”2 Along these lines, Healy and
Welchert called for the community of mentoring scholars to “synthesize empirical
findings into a coherent body of knowledge” to identify and explore unanswered
mentoring questions.3 Merriam regarded the mentoring relationship as “a powerful
emotional interaction between an older and younger person, a relationship in
which the older member is trusted, loving, and experienced in the guidance of the
younger.”4 Additionally, Kram brought the mentoring relationship to the working
world where “a mentor supports, guides, and counsels the young adult as he or she
accomplishes the important tasks of learning to navigate in the adult world and the
world of work.”5
Studies show that both the mentor and protégé benefit from the relationship.
Levinson et al. found in their study of young men that mentoring was the most
important relationship in young adult males’ development. This finding suggests that
young men not only benefit psychologically from the mentoring relationship, but
mentors also help young men develop skills and their intellect in ways that lead to
advancement in their careers.6 Kram’s longitudinal studies of mentoring relationships
in large corporations revealed that the benefits mentors received from the interaction
included, but were not limited to, internal satisfaction, broader recognition in the
field, and praise and respect from external parties.7

INFORMAL SOCIALIZATION

Informal socialization refers to newcomers’ learning occurring through informal

interactions with “socialization agents.”8 Newcomers can be both students as well
as new professors. In the case of academic careers, new assistant professors must
find more experienced mentors in their departments in order to gain important
knowledge that facilitates their career development. The knowledge includes but
is not limited to department politics, workplace culture, work-life balance, funding
mechanisms, etc.
However, because mentoring is not a formal process, the informal socialization
process is easily overlooked by many physical scientists and engineers. Nevertheless,
it plays an important role in women doctoral students’ graduate school experiences
and career development. Many symbolic norms and values within an organization,
which are not made explicit to the new members upon their arrival, are interpreted and
learned by these new members from their daily informal socialization experiences
with their peers and senior members within their organization.
From professors’ perspectives, socializing students into academic careers
requires students to take the initiative to communicate with them about whether

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or not they are interested in pursuing a career in academia. A professor from

engineering expressed her view on this topic:
It depends on the student. Some are very focused on an academic career and
I’d say they either come in with that as their goal or they come in not knowing
what their goal is. I think relatively a smaller number know that they have a
different career goal from academia but as they move along they may decide
that academia is not for them. They’re most interested in an industrial type
position or government labs.
This comment was made by a senior professor in engineering. Her observation
was also reflected by many student participants who shared their confusion when it
came to career goals at the beginning of their doctoral programs.
While doctoral women students shared the reasons why they demurred on
bringing up discussions of career options, faculty members had concerns of their
own. An astronomy professor shared her insights about mentoring doctoral students
and the tendency for faculty to steer doctoral students towards academic careers:
One challenge is that academics are always accused of only recommending
academia and portraying that as the only definition of success. I think that is a
challenge. That is a big pit we all fall into repeatedly. This recent student said
that she wasn’t sure [about going into academia] and instead of saying that that
was okay, I guess I sort of questioned why she was making that choice. So I
guess for me this is a challenge because I saw her as somebody who is very
talented and I didn’t understand why she was not going this route because I
think she has the potential. So I wanted to pose the question to show her that
she was capable, but at the same time I was feeling conflicted. I was doing
this thing that we’re all accused of, that that’s the only route to success. And
yet I wanted to make sure she wasn’t falling off the track because she felt she
couldn’t do it or she felt like this life [academic life] was too crazy.
This professor in astronomy then explained that this is why she normally does not
bring up the topic of career options with her students.
A few faculty members emphasized the importance for students to be proactive
and take the initiative to consider and discuss their career trajectories with faculty
advisers. One male professor discerned his timeline and system when it came to
providing career-related guidance to his doctoral students:
The median time for graduation in my subject is six years. First two years are
classes and then it’s like a wasted year and then they get into research later.
Typically it’s like that. But they all know it’s extraordinarily difficult to get
a job in this subject especially in this time when there is no money. So they
bring up the discussions of career choices early. Typically a year before they
leave because you typically need to apply for a job before you get out. So I’m
guessing they probably think about it for a year before they talk to me. Then

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they talk to me about possible places they can go and I just tell them whatever I
know. For example, this is a good place or a bad place in general. Usually they
tend to be too conservative. If you go to a yuppie school, like Harvard, MIT,
or Cal Tech, the attitude is different. But if you go to a public school, there
is a little bit of a tendency to cut yourself down and not apply for the more
prestigious schools. So I tell them to be confident and apply for everything
because those guys in MIT are no better than you and that’s really true. When
they have kind of a psychological breakthrough, they went ahead and apply
and some of them get those high level places too.

This professor’s comment posed three interesting points. First, he automatically

assumed that his doctoral students normally “waste” one year after they pass their
qualifying exam. Second, he considered bringing up the topic of career only one
year prior to graduation as “early.” He then elaborated that he does not like to talk
about job prospects with his students because he felt that if they were true scientists
they would be passionate about doing science instead of finding a well-paid job.
Additionally, this physical sciences adviser shared his style of mentoring students
during the last year in graduate school. He encouraged students to break their
conservative mode and apply for as many prestigious positions as possible. Student
participants who receive this kind of positive and encouraging feedback from their
faculty advisers are more likely to pursue careers in academia.
What this professor did not realize is that none of his Chinese women students
had ever brought up the topic of career planning with him. And this is a consistent
trend among Chinese women scientists and engineers. If their advisers do not
initiate career-planning conversations with them, they do not proactively discuss
the strategies with the advisers as they are afraid that their advisers will not consider
them “serious scientists.” This practice creates a severe gap in Chinese women’s
graduate school experience, as they have little to no preparation when it comes to job
applications upon their graduation.
There are many reasons for this, but one perhaps is the cultural difference. It simply
has not been the normal practice for Chinese students to take a proactive stance
with their professors. The tradition is to wait for professors to bring up new subjects
to discuss with their students. My findings show that since many Chinese women
scientists and engineers often do not proactively interact with their professors, they
end up missing out on many mentoring and career opportunities.

GENDERED MENTORING

Regarding graduate school settings, mentoring has been characterized as the most
crucial aspect of the educational experience.9 Graduate students are likely to benefit
from the mentoring relationships in various areas: professional identity, academic
productivity, professional networking, graduate school satisfaction, and academic
career advancement.10

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Levinson et al.’s study has been widely cited by mentoring scholars, since it
makes great contributions in connecting mentoring studies with adult development,
but it ignored two critical aspects.11 First, the positive influences of mentoring tend
to be overemphasized by the existing mentoring literature. Based on an extensive
review of the published workplace and graduate school mentoring literature, Healy
and Welchert asserted that many studies “used a tautological definition of mentoring
that produced positively biased samples.”12 The spontaneous association between
mentoring and positive experience/relationships has misled many researchers to
focus their research hypotheses on the protégés’ positive experiences, satisfaction,
and outcomes in graduate school, while possibly ignoring some of the more
deleterious effects.
The second problem, which is more relevant to the current study, lies in the
perspectives of gendered mentoring. Several recent studies have identified and
addressed cross-gender mentoring problems by determining that not all mentoring
relationships are beneficial to the people involved.13
McManus, Simon, and Russell studied mentoring experiences from the women
protégé’s perspective by surveying over 200 managers in a large executive
development program and unveiled a series of unpleasant, and even harmful,
mentoring experiences. They reported that these kinds of negative experiences
were especially evident when the mentor’s and the protégé’s values and attitudes
differed.14
Kram raised concerns regarding the stereotypical roles and sexual tensions that
occur in a relationship between a female protégé and a male mentor.15 Clawson and
Kram argued that in the case of dealing with cross-gender relationships, mentors and
protégés tend to rely on traditional roles learned from other settings, complicating
the mentoring relationship.16 Noe similarly contended that most women protégés
prefer interaction with mentors from the same gender.17 This phenomenon leads to
a lack of mentor relationships for many young professional women as they enter
a male-dominated field. A recent study based on a national survey for clinical
psychology doctoral students revealed significantly different mentoring experiences
between men and women, including “competitiveness between mentor and protégé,
sexism by the mentor, a perception that the mentor favored male graduate students,
and emotional or sexual attraction between mentor and protégé.”18
An alternative approach to mentoring research is to completely neglect gender as
a dimension. Ehrich, Hansford, and Tennent’s comprehensive review and analysis
of mentoring literature in education contexts revealed a shocking number of studies
that ignored gender factors in studying mentoring issues in education – only
2.5 percent of all studies reviewed had gender as the work’s focus.19 Levinson et al.’s
study, mentioned above, conducted over 30 years ago, is typical in that it focused
primarily on the male protégé’s experience in a mentoring relationship.20 Given
that cross-gender relationships may bring more complexities and ethical concerns,
it is important to conduct more research that specifically considers gender as an
important facet of the experience.21

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Although a small number of more recent studies have polarized an already limited
understanding of cross-gender mentoring relationship concerns by concluding that
no gender differences have been found in their studies, the studies’ samples have
been chosen mostly from the social sciences and humanities, where there is a higher
proportion of both women professors and students than in the physical sciences and
engineering. To clarify the definition of mentoring in the graduate school context,
Rose’s study developed and employed the Ideal Mentor Scale (IMS) and surveyed
over 500 doctoral students from two universities in the midwestern region of the
U.S.22 She found that women placed more weight on the importance of the mentor’s
role-modeling and professional ethics functions than did men, but found there were
no gender differences in terms of the definition of an ideal mentor.
Tenenbaum, Crosby, and Gliner sampled 89 graduate students from six departments
and investigated their graduate school satisfaction, academic productivity, and
mentoring outcomes, based on both advisers’ and mentees’ gender. They reported
that gender differences appeared to be insignificant. Male advisers provided slightly
less  psychological help, but there were no significant differences found between
men and women advisers.23 However, the sample size of Tenenbaum et al.’s study
was fairly limited and was designed in a way to measure adviser-advisee gender
differences based on surveying advisees, who tend to be vulnerable in such a
powerful dynamic.
Rose’s study focused on testing the definition of mentoring between men and
women.24 Although her research results suggested that women and men doctoral
students defined their “ideal mentor” in a similar manner, nothing was found
about real-life student-faculty mentoring relationships, protégé graduate school
experiences, or whether or not there was a gender gap in such a dynamic. More
studies are advised to deepen our understanding of the relationship between graduate
school mentoring and students’ career outcomes from both protégés’ and mentors’
points of view.
Despite the “gender equity” in graduate school claimed by some studies, many
large-scale longitudinal studies have revealed significant gaps between female and
male students regarding student-faculty interactions at the undergraduate level. Sax
analyzed 40 years of U.S. colleges’ entering student data, and found that twenty-
first century women college students were facing many disparities in terms of
their confidence and stress levels as well as financial situations when compared to
their male counterparts.25 A 2005 study by Sax, Bryant, and Harper suggested that
female and male students may benefit differently from their interactions with faculty
members.26 A more recent study by Kim and Sax about student-faculty interaction
in research universities demonstrated that course-related student-faculty interactions
could inspire students to pursue more advanced degrees. Yet, male students displayed
stronger patterns of interaction with faculty than female students.27
Many studies regarding student-faculty interaction at the graduate school level
have focused on graduate students in psychology and business programs.28 Paglis,

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Green, and Bauer conducted a five-year study to investigate the benefits that doctoral
students in the physical sciences received from their mentoring relationships during
their training processes. This study resulted in a higher statistical correlation between
mentoring relationships and doctoral students’ research productivity, commitment to
research careers, and self-efficacy.29 However, the majority of the sample in this
study were male doctoral students, and gender was not considered as a variable in
the study. A majority of studies have focused on assessing or testing the mentoring
issues based on the protégés’ rating of their graduate school experiences,30 and
consequently, little is known about the mentoring relationship from the mentor’s
perspective.31 Additionally, most mentoring literature tends to automatically consider
graduate students’ advisers to be their mentors and this runs the risk of equating the
advising relationship with the mentoring relationship.32
Maher, Ford, and Thompson investigated women doctoral students’ degree
completion progress and the corresponding relationship with their graduate
experiences in an education program.33 Results showed that early-completing
women doctoral students were more likely to receive stronger support from faculty
mentors and sufficient funding opportunities. Utilizing data collected from both
alumni and recent graduates, this study focused on the issue of women’s doctoral
completion rates and multi-faceted graduate school factors. Yet the relationship
between women’s career outcomes and their graduate school experiences was
neither analyzed nor provided. Nationality was rarely considered as a variable in
existing mentoring in graduate school literature.

INTERACTIONS AND COMMUNICATION WITH ADVISERS

As noted above, the difference between advising and mentoring is often obscured,
not only in many studies but by both students and faculty themselves. Advisers are
different from mentors. Advising generally focuses more on strictly academic and
dissertation research concerns, while mentoring also looks at longer-term career and
professional development planning.
Although all women doctoral students participating in this study had various
degrees of interaction with their advisers, communications regarding career
trajectories between protégés and mentors were mostly ambiguous. Both students
and professors shared their reservations and reasons why they did not normally bring
up the topic related to career aspirations and job hunting. A fourth-year Chinese
woman student shared her concerns:
Even if I told him that I would like to enter a research institution and become
a professor there, I really have no idea what he’s going to do to help me
move forward. He hasn’t had that many graduate students before and I’m his
first student after he moved to this university. I’ve been kind of putting up
applications for postdoc myself. I’m sure he will probably help me but he
doesn’t see that I’m at that point yet.

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This student had doubts about her adviser’s ability to help her with her career
decision-making process. Thus, instead of discussing career related topics with her
adviser, she started working on submitting postdoctoral applications on her own.
This student acknowledged that such a situation put her at a disadvantage when it
came to the quality of her applications.
A common pattern was discovered in the process of interacting with the women:
They did not see the necessity for talking about potential careers, given that they
perceived their “only responsibility in graduate school is to do good research and be
productive.” A fourth-year doctoral student asserted:
My adviser never asked me what I’m going to do in the future. Maybe I
will spend more time considering that question during the next year. For the
first several years, I just concentrate on my classes and research. My adviser
probably thinks it’s too early now to consider that.
In this case, this student was left to speculate about her adviser’s rationale for not
addressing her future, but a frank and open conversation may have benefitted her
own career development.
Many other Chinese women participating in this study also interpreted the fact
that their advisers did not bring up their career trajectories, as “they don’t think
we’re ready for that talk yet.” Others set a timeline based on their progress in their
doctoral programs and are “waiting for the best time to talk to their advisers.” As
another fourth-year doctoral student explained:
I will probably talk to my adviser about my career plan after my proposal
is passed. I always wanted to talk to him about my career choices but I just
couldn’t. He’s very new in this field. So I don’t know the standard. He always
tells us to do it quickly but we just can’t! It’s better when we already got some
good results and then talk to him about our jobs. But now I’m not confident
enough to talk to him.
This student was clearly willing to discuss her career-related questions with her
adviser. However, she was unsure of her own “readiness” to bring up this topic.
In fact, many Chinese women interviewed had such a concern. They wished their
advisers all had some kind of criteria or a checklist that they could achieve before
they bring up the topic of a career. For example, another interviewee said her adviser
told her and other students that they needed to publish at least three tier-one journal
articles before they could even think about getting a faculty job. So she had been
working towards that and was planning on bringing up the “career talk” with her
adviser as soon as she achieved the goal.
One student in physical sciences particularly pointed out that she perceived her
doctoral adviser as only part of her graduate school life and believed that she should
depend primarily on herself when it came to future career choices:

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I think it’s less difficult now for me to talk to her. It was impossible for me to
even imagine having this conversation with her two years ago. But I think it
[career aspirations] really comes down to the question – what do I want to do
with my life? I mean I have committed to my PhD life and I have been always
trying my best to make my adviser happy. But what I really want to do next
is really up to me. I need something that makes me happy. My adviser never
brought up this topic before and I don’t think she cares.
This interviewee’s adviser was a renowned scholar in the particular field and had
a very strong network of scholars collaborating with her. However, this student did
not get many opportunities during her doctoral studies to work directly with her or
receive much feedback from her. She said that her adviser was always “too busy with
her multi-million research projects” and “never [has] time for a little doctoral student
like me.” This kind of incident was commonly reported among the Chinese students
who had renowned scholars as their advisers.

DYSFUNCTIONAL ADVISER-ADVISEE RELATIONSHIPS:

IMPACT OF A LACK OF MENTORING

Data revealed that daily graduate school interactions and socialization consisted of
much more than collecting and calculating data, building models, drafting plots,
and publishing results. Much of it, especially as regards future career prospects,
relates to establishing relationships with others in one’s field, such as peers and
professors. This is one of the most valuable aspects of graduate school. However,
many student participants tended to idealize the type of experience they would
receive in graduate school prior to the beginning of their doctoral studies, and
imagined doctoral programs to be a place where they would receive all levels of
mentoring. They had little to no understanding of the importance of relationship-
building in graduate school. Most of them only gradually realized that they would
need to take the initiative to create a mentoring environment and to negotiate
research, publication, and teaching responsibilities for themselves in a brand new
cultural environment.
This study unveiled many dysfunctional adviser-advisee relationships and how
women doctoral protégés eventually realized that “graduate school is what they
make out of it” and that “having a famous adviser does not mean you will get proper
mentoring.” A common misconception among Chinese doctoral students was that a
famous adviser would get you very far in terms of building networks and landing
your first job. On several occasions, I was told by Chinese women students and
postdocs that they were struggling because they were being ignored by their advisers,
creating a lack of proper guidance in graduate school.
The harsh reality is that the women scientists and engineers in this study reported
that there were no particular programs in their departments or institutions that

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were geared towards international women’s needs, nor did they provide resources
for students like them to grow professionally and promote their careers at a more
advanced level. So they have had to discover ways of advancing themselves and
supporting others. In particular, they have discovered the benefits of attending
conferences to reach out to a broader community of Chinese women scientists.
Through the interactions with other Chinese women doctoral students, researchers,
and professors at professional gatherings, these doctoral students found the support
necessary to keep them motivated to complete graduate school. Additionally, these
newfound mentors helped facilitate the graduate school to work-life transition that
women doctoral students eventually face.
A large majority of Chinese women graduate students normally only worked
with a single professor and on only one or two projects throughout their entire
doctoral program; this professor was usually the student’s adviser. This limited the
opportunities for students to obtain an array of letters of reference, which constrains
their career preparation opportunities. Women who had limited connections outside
of their home institutions experienced challenges in finding suitable references. A
fifth-year PhD candidate shared her thoughts:
I ended up having this mentor who is from Cornell. We met at a conference
during my second year and she has been a really big influence over the course
of my PhD. And I wasn’t really expecting that, but it was a very good thing,
and she’s been very helpful promoting my career, and she was one of the
people who I listed in my job application. It wasn’t really something that I was
looking for, but it just I think it turned out to be the best thing that happened in
my PhD program. She’s more like a friend than a mentor and she is definitely
a good complement to my adviser. As he has not done much in advising me
about career preparation.
I recently learned that this Chinese woman has secured her first postdoctoral
position and that the research group she will be joining is led by a Chinese professor
who used to be in the same doctoral program with the female professor from Cornell.
When I had discussions with these women about the challenges they faced
interacting with their advisers, they were likely to use mild or ironic language to
describe the serious barriers presented by the lack of and/or negative mentoring. For
example, many doctoral women used the phrase “hands-off” to indicate a “lack of
mentoring interactions.” A Chinese postdoc looked back on her four and half years
of graduate life and stated:
My adviser is very hands-off and I think that style was definitely not good
for me for the first couple of years, especially when I am new to the U.S.
Eventually, I just figured out myself what I should be doing, so I did it. Some
other women dropped out. She [her adviser] is almost not approachable because
of other engagements. Our interaction was, basically, [that] I went to her if I
absolutely needed something. It’s more like I have to take the initiative to ask,

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“Should I take this class or not?” or “Should I be taking my qualifying exams

sometime soon?” She didn’t really guide me through my academic progress. I
figured everything out on my own.
This postdoc then told me that, at the beginning of her doctoral studies, she
thought having a prestigious female adviser would give her an advantage, but it
turned out to be irrelevant. Based on the data collected in this study, the gender of
the adviser does not necessarily play an important role when it comes to absence
of mentoring. It is true that the advisers who were reported to “ignore” students’
professional development needs, choosing instead to “focus on their own research”
or “only pay attention to their own companies,” were all male. However, student
participants believed that faculty ranks appeared to be a stronger indicator in this
case than gender: Both men and women full professors, especially nationally and
internationally renowned professors, were less likely to spend time mentoring their
doctoral students and were less likely to organize networks and other necessary
qualifications to get their students prepared for the competitive job market.
Discussions with student participants revealed that the lack of efficient mentoring
extended beyond daily research practices. Some of them expressed concerns
over incidents at professional conferences where they hoped to be introduced to
prestigious scholars by their advisers, yet the advisers would just “leave the students
behind” and “hang out with their friends.” As a nearly graduating doctoral student
put it, “If having a famous adviser means there is no mentoring and networking
opportunities, then I should have started working with an assistant professor, who at
least knows I exist.”
On a more significant note, several newly-minted Chinese women PhDs shared
their experiences related to being verbally abused by their male professors. Several
of them attributed this phenomenon to the perceived fact that “they were less likely
to be treated equally compared to their American and male counterparts by their
advisers.” A physics student shared her reactions to her adviser’s abuse:
It [adviser yelling at me] definitely did not help [with my progress]. It made
it so much worse. He makes me feel stupid every day. I really take that
personally. I question myself everyday. This is my fourth year here and I still
don’t think I’m qualified to be in this program. I don’t think I can even get
close to an academic position. Well, I don’t know how I’m going to graduate
if it continues like this.
Other women in physical sciences felt that the language their male advisers used
sometimes sent mixed messages, which intended to be encouraging, but seemed to
be so harsh that many women participants were likely to internalize them. Another
woman physics student’s story mirrored this phenomenon:
I’m clinically depressed and am under treatment now. I can see myself giving
up actually, like just dropping out of grad school. So I guess mentoring means
a lot to me, even though his behavior is very contradictory. He tries to be

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encouraging, but he phrases [encouragement] in a very intense way. You might

get a little offended at the beginning, but if you think in a deeper way, you
realize that the motives behind what he’s saying are good. For example, he
can be very meticulous about little things that aren’t important, so you would
get frustrated when you see that. But after a while, you think about it and you
realize that what he’s saying is for your own good. So I put up with it, but I
know I can’t do that forever. English is not my first language so that makes it
even harder to get what he is implying sometimes.
This interviewee in physics told me that she never communicated with her
adviser about her problems. She told me that her adviser was not an empathetic
person and that sharing her problems with him only made her look weak. She
observed to me, “He already thinks that I am at disadvantage because I came
from China, so asking him questions and sharing concerns would make me
look even weaker!” While a lack of mentoring could be somewhat resolved by
reaching out to senior Chinese graduate students and postdoctoral researchers for
advice in certain situations, certain women doctoral students expressed extreme
frustration and anxiety when their advisers “do not care enough to keep their
[students’] deadlines in mind” for letters of recommendation for job applications
or publication submissions.
A woman in space sciences shared her “anxiety-filled” job application process
due to her adviser’s indifferent attitude:
He likes to use the phrase “It’s not my problem.” It is my most hated phrase in
the whole universe after all these years working with him. For example, I have
a postdoc position that is waiting for me to graduate. So I told him that I need
to get all this stuff done and it would be great if [he] could read my thesis at
least before the defense, and give me feedback. And he’s like, “That’s not my
problem.”
This research participant ended up having to bring on board a co-chair who could
help her push the progress forward and get her dissertation approved on time for
her to start her postdoctoral position at a reasonable time. She had learned about the
concept of “co-chair” from a more senior Chinese scientist who had had the same
adviser during her doctoral studies.
Many conversations with student participants revealed an interesting “golden
child” phenomenon, which indicated favoritism towards certain male students
by senior women faculty members. However, nationality did not seem to be
significant in this phenomenon. Some student participants revealed their concerns
of “not getting enough attention and resources from their advisers.” This finding
challenges the existing literature, which indicates that women mentors are more
suitable for women protégés when it comes to the professional development
process. It further illuminated the complex situations created by cross-gender
mentoring.

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Several participating students reported the difficulties and barriers caused by

dysfunctional mentoring relationships with their faculty advisers. Under such
circumstances, the Chinese and other international students (both male and female)
were more likely to be at a disadvantage compared to their American counterparts.
Unlike the Americans, they had to concern themselves with the possibility that their
advisers would not sponsor their visas if they complained to someone about the
dysfunctional advising relationships. They were also generally less aware of any
institutional resources that could help them navigate the process. Some students
ended up dropping out of their programs while others ended up navigating the
system by themselves, some more successfully than others. Those who successfully
navigated the system utilized their network of women engineers and scientists.
This concept will be discussed in depth in the later chapters on Chinese women’s
transnational networks.

ADVISERS’ AND MENTORS’ VALUE FOR NETWORKING

Some advisers do manage to leverage their extensive networks to promote their

doctoral students’ work. A fourth-year engineering student shared her story about
discussing career trajectories with her adviser, which was prompted by a request that
her adviser received from a colleague. This professor had received an invitation to
lead a research center at one university on the east coast. He turned down the offer
yet recommended this woman student to researchers who had started working at the
new research center.
Some students reflected on their experiences attending conferences with their
advisers, and indicated that conversations with them have led to very crucial
discussions of their career paths and how they should approach the next steps of
pursing an academic career. A fourth-year engineering student shared that she always
knew she should have the conversation about careers with her adviser. However,
she never found a chance to bring it up. Then she went to a conference where a
professor from a different university asked questions about her presentation. When
she got back to her home institution, she asked her adviser about this professor.
Her adviser said, “He is a good person to get a postdoc with if you want to get into
that direction.” As a result, this student is now in the process of applying for that
postdoctoral position. This experience made her realize that her “adviser just doesn’t
want to actively push me in one way or another but he definitely wants me to bring
up the conversation.”
A woman doctoral student in astronomy shared how a particular conference
served as the platform for her adviser to introduce her to other scholars in the field
and gave her further guidance about who could potentially offer her a permanent
position:
Even though we are a small group, there are still a small amount of jobs out
there as well. I’m also doing instrumentation, which actually widens my job

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aspect compared to most graduates here. This one conference that I went to
with my adviser was important. There was just two of us from the university
and I told him about wanting to give a talk so people will remember my name.
He told me that it was a great idea and it could help me to get a job in the future.
He introduced me to a lot of colleagues who are from different institutions and
several of them expressed interest in working with me.
This participant started working on a collaborative research project with several
professors whom she was introduced to by her adviser. One of the professors had
expressed interest in continuing to work with her upon graduation.

NSF ADVANCE: WHERE ARE THE FOREIGN-BORN WOMEN?

The significant role of mentoring in shaping women’s career trajectories and

expanding their networks in science and engineering has been extensively studied
since the beginning of NSF ADVANCE program in 2001, which offers grants
focused  on developing systemic strategies to increase women and minorities’
representation in academic science and engineering.34
The earlier years of the program included smaller grants that aimed at assisting
individual women and minority leaders in the fields of science and engineering.
Those grants have been discontinued in favor of large “Institutional Transformation”
grants, which have gained momentum during recent years. In 2014, the “PLAN”
(Partnerships for Learning and Adaptation Networks) grants were introduced in
replacement of the “PAID” (Partnerships for Adaptation, Implementation, and
Dissemination) grants. The new focus of the program is the result of earlier research
from the NSF ADVANCE program that makes it clear that women and minority
mentoring effectiveness can only be achieved through institutional changes and
that the role of networking in advancing women’s careers in academic science and
engineering cannot be underestimated.
An ever-growing body of literature continuously discusses the goals, challenges,
and achievements of the NSF ADVANCE program, particularly as they relate to
the strategies, processes, and outcomes many grant-receiving institutions have
implemented.35 Increasing mentoring activities and creating mentoring programs
were one of the major focal points for the existing studies. Particularly, many young
women academics value the informal information sharing, work-life balance support,
and performance expectations they are able to gain from their mentors.36 Mentoring
also significantly reduces these women’s anxiety and feelings of isolation in many
science and engineering programs. Other studies have found that providing access to
department resources and networking opportunities are major benefits gained from
having mentors for many unrepresented women faculty in science and engineering.37
However, several feminist scholars have studied the NSF ADVANCE program
through critical lenses, pointed out its challenges, and identified other systematic
changes that need to be addressed in order to improve women academics’ experiences

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in science and engineering.38 Morimoto and Zajicek’s 2014 study examined 28

ADVANCE grant proposals and web resources for 37 universities that received the
NSF ADVANCE grants during the 2000s. They studied the effectiveness of these
programs through gendered organizational lenses. The findings identified a main
concern of NSF ADVANCE programs: “because multiple dimensions of inequality
are embedded in organizational logics, questions of intersectionality re-emerge as an
inherent tension in the ADVANCE program.”39
Others have suggested that the NSF ADVANCE program’s approaches to assisting
individual women by providing mentoring and networking opportunities are not
sufficient for addressing underrepresented minorities’ needs, as they do not follow
the traditional model of climbing the tenure ladder.40 Many studies have discussed
the impact of peer mentoring when it comes to minority women in science and
engineering, which is consistent with the findings of this study on Chinese women
scientists and engineers.41 In their study of Black women faculty, Henderson, Hunter,
and Hildreth suggested that “a discussion of mentoring without acknowledging the
intersections of race and gender, their implications within predominately White
institutions, and forms of resistance would not address fully the needs of Black
women in the academy.”42 They then suggested that in order for NSF ADVANCE
programs to be successful, they must develop programs that address the unique
needs and positioning of Black women faculty in science and engineering.
In review of NSF ADVANCE literature and reports, I could not stop noticing
that a key group of women faculty in science and engineering was missing from the
proposed institutional transformation plans: Asian-born, especially Chinese-born,
women faculty. The statistical data documenting Asian-born women faculty remain
extremely scarce, yet many incidents revealed in this study described the unique
challenges and the needs for mentoring and networking opportunities for this group
of women faculty. The NSF ADVANCE program’s official website states: “Special
populations of women, for the purposes of the ADVANCE Program, includes
women of diverse characteristics and backgrounds including, but not limited to:
race, ethnicity, disability status and sexual orientation.”43 If that is the case, then
women faculty who are Asian-born have been largely overlooked despite there being
a significant number of such women in the U.S. science and engineering academy.
Perhaps it is the time for the NSF ADVANCE program to include and address the
issues as part of institutional transformation for academic science and engineering?

NOTES
1
Edward McCrorie, trans., The Odyssey by Homer. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).
2
Anne G. Bogat and Robin L. Redner, “How Mentoring Affects the Professional Development of
Women in Psychology,” Professional Psychology: Research and Practice 19 (1985).
3
Charles C. Healy and Alice J. Welchert, “Mentoring Relations: A Definition to Advance Research and
Practice,” Educational Researcher 19 (1990): 17–21.
4
Sharan Merriam, “Mentors and Protégés: A Critical Review of the Literature,” Adult Education
Quarterly 33 (1983): 162.

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5
Kathy Kram, Mentoring at Work: Developmental Relationships in Organizational Life, 2.
6
Daniel Levinson, Charlotte N. Darrow, Edward B. Klein, Maria H. Levinson, and Braxton McKee,
The Seasons of a Man’s Life (New York: Knopf, 1978). Note that even in a work whose authors
include two women, the subject is a “man’s” life.
7
Kathy Kram, “Mentoring Processes at Work: Developmental Relationships in Managerial Careers”
(PhD diss., Yale University, 1980).
8
Van Maanen and Schein, Toward A Theory Of Organizational Socialization.
9
Estelle Phillips and Derek Pugh, How to Get a PhD: A Handbook for Students and Their Supervisors,
2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1994).
10
Richard Clark, Sherry Harden, and W. Brad Johnson, “Mentor Relationships in Clinical Psychology
Doctoral Training: Results of a National Survey,” Teaching of Psychology 27 (2000); Stephen Green
and Talya Bauer, “Supervisory Mentoring by Advisers: Relationships with Doctoral Student Potential,
Productivity, and Commitment,” Personnel Psychology 48 (1995); Harriet Tenenbaum, Faye Crosby,
and Melissa Gliner, “Mentoring Relationships in Graduate School,” Journal of Vocational Behavior
59 (2001); Vivian Weil, “Mentoring: Some Ethical Considerations,” Science and Engineering Ethics
7 (2001).
11
Levinson et al., The Seasons of a Man’s Life; Gail Rose, “Enhancement of Mentor Selection Using the
Ideal Mentor Scale,” Research in Higher Education 44 (2003).
12
Healy and Welchert, “Mentoring Relations,” 19.
13
Janette Long, “The Dark Side of Mentoring,” Australian Educational Researcher 24 (1997); Norma
T. Mertz, “Using Mentoring to Advance Females and Minorities in a Corporate Environment,” in
The Organizational and Human Dimensions of Successful Mentoring Programs and Relationships,
ed. Frances K. Kochan (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2002): 221–242; Jennifer
Waldeck, Victoria Orrego, Timothy Plax, and Patricia Kearney, “Graduate Student Faculty Mentoring
Relationships: Who Gets Mentored, How It Happens, and to What End,” Communication Quarterly
45 (1997).
14
Lillian T. Eby, Stacy E. McManus, Shana A. Simon, and Joyce E. A. Russell, “The Protege’s
Perspective Regarding Negative Mentoring Experiences: The Development of a Taxonomy,” Journal
of Vocational Behavior 57, 1–21 (2000).
15
Kram, Mentoring at Work: Developmental Relationships in Organizational Life.
16
Clawson, James G and Kathy Kram. 1984. “Managing Cross-Gender Mentoring” Business Horizons
27(3):22–32.
17
Raymond A. Noe, “Women and Mentoring: A Review and Research Agenda,” Academy of
Management Review 13 (1998).
18
Clark et al., “Mentor Relationships in Clinical Psychology Doctoral Training,” 266.
19
Lisa Ehrich, Brian Hansford, and Lee Tennent, “Formal Mentoring Programs in Education and Other
Professions: A Review of the Literature,” Educational Administration Quarterly 40 (2004).
20
Levinson et al., The Seasons of a Man’s Life.
21
Kram, Mentoring at Work: Developmental Relationships in Organizational Life; W. Brad Johnson and
Nancy Nelson, “Mentor-Protégé Relationships in Graduate Training: Some Ethical Concerns,” Ethics
& Behavior 9 (1999).
22
Gail Rose, “Group Differences in Graduate Students’ Concepts of the Ideal Mentor,” Research in
Higher Education 46, no. 1 (2005): 53–80.
23
Tenenbaum et al., “Mentoring Relationships in Graduate School.”
24
Rose, “Group Differences.”
25
Linda J. Sax, “College Women Still Face Many Obstacles in Reaching Their Full Potential,” Chronicle
of Higher Education 54, no. 5 (2007).
26
Linda J. Sax, Alyssa N. Bryant, and Casandra E. Harper, “The Differential Effects of Student-Faculty
Interaction on College Outcomes for Women and Men,” Journal of College Student Development 46,
no. 6 (2005): 642–657.
27
Young K. Kim and Linda J. Sax, “Student-Faculty Interaction in Research Universities: Differences
by Student Gender, Race, Social Class, and First-Generation Status,” Research in Higher Education
50, no. 5 (2009): 437–459.

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28
Ehrich et al., “Formal Mentoring Programs in Education and Other Professions.”
29
Laura L. Paglis, Stephen G. Green, and Talya N. Bauer, “Does Adviser Mentoring Add Value? A
Longitudinal Study of Mentoring and Doctoral Student Outcomes,” Research in Higher Education
47, no. 4 (2006): 451–476.
30
Rose, “Enhancement of Mentor Selection.”
31
E. J. Crosby, “The Developing Literature on Developmental Relationships,” in Mentoring Dilemmas:
Developmental Relationships within Multicultural Organizations, eds. Audrey J. Murrell, Faye J.
Crosby, & Robin J. Ely (Hillsdale, HJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1999); Norma T. Mertz, “What’s a Mentor,
Anyway?” Educational Administration Quarterly 40 (2004): 541–560.
32
Rose, “Group Differences.”
33
Maher, Ford, and Thompson, “Degree Progress of Women Doctoral Students.”
34
See the NSF website on the ADVANCE program at http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?
pims_id=5383
35
See Stewart et al.’s 2007 study on early evaluation of recruiting female faculty in science and
engineering: Abigail J. Stewart, Janet E. Malley, and Danielle LaVaque-Manty, Transforming Science
and Engineering: Advancing Academic Women (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press,
2007); also see Arbuckle-Keil and Valentine’s 2010 study on initial impact of an NSF ADVANCE-
Institutional Transformation award to Rutgers University: G. A. Arbuckle-Keil and D. Valentine,
“Initial Impacts of an NSF ADVANCE-IT Award to Rutgers University from the Viewpoint of the
Camden Campus,” ACS Symposium Series 1057 (2010); and Bilimoria and Liang’s 2012 study on
gender equity in science and engineering in higher education context: Diana Bilimoria and Xiangfen
Liang, Gender Equity in Science and Engineering: Advancing Change in Higher Education (London:
Routledge, 2012).
36
See Catherine Mavriplis, Rachelle Heller, Cheryl Beil, Kim Dam, Natalya Yassinskaya, Megan Shaw,
and Charlene Sorensen, “Mind the Gap: Women in STEM Career Breaks” Journal of Technology
Management and Innovation 5, no. 1 (2010).
37
See Julia A. Stenken and Anna M. Zajicek, “The Importance of Asking, Mentoring and Building
Networks for Academic Career Success: A Personal and Social Science Perspective,” Analytical and
Bioanalytical Chemistry 396, no. 2 (2009): 541–546.
38
See Bird’s 2011 study on the gendered bureaucratic structures of academia: Sharon R. Bird,
“Unsettling Universities’ Incongruous, Gendered Bureaucratic Structures: A Case-Study Approach,”
Gender, Work & Organization 18, no. 2 (2011): 202–230.
39
See Shauna A. Morimoto and Anna Zajicek, “Dismantling the ‘Master’s House’: Feminist Reflections
on Institutional Transformation,” Critical Sociology 40, no. 1 (2014): 138.
40
See Joan Acker, “Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies: A Theory of Gendered Organizations,” Gender & Society
4, no. 2 (1990): 139–158; Morimoto & Zajicek, “Dismantling the ‘Master’s House’.”
41
See Naomi C. Chesler and Mark A. Chesler, “Gender-Informed Mentoring Strategies for Women
Engineering Scholars: On Establishing a Caring Community,” Journal of Engineering Education 91,
no. 1 (2002): 49–55.
42
See Tammy Henderson, Andrea G. Hunter, and Gladys J. Hildreth, “Outsiders within the Academy:
Strategies for Resistance and Mentoring African American Women.” Michigan Family Review 14, no.
1 (2010): 29.
43
Retrieved from NSF ADVANCE website at http://www.nsf.gov/mobile/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?
pims_id=5383

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CAREER PATHS

COMMON CAREER PATHS

Many Chinese-born women scientists and engineers in this study were extremely
motivated and goal-driven. The most obvious indication of their competitiveness
was the fact that they were constantly looking for opportunities to prepare for and
advance their careers. However, the path is a windy and frustrating one. This chapter
delineates the reasons for this and proposes some solutions to the problem.
Many women participating in the interviews offered insights into comparisons
between careers in academia, industry, and government research laboratories. Some
of the most compelling reasons for interviewed Chinese women to choose academic
careers related to the high level of autonomy, academic freedom, and the stability
associated with the salaries and benefits. The research participants who decided
to work towards an academic career upon graduation reported an attraction to
the interaction and mentoring experience with undergraduate students. However,
in general, a national laboratory career path was less likely for Chinese women to
pursue given their visa constraints and national security clearance obstacles.
Almost all of the women interviewed had fulfilled teaching duties for one year or
more during their graduate studies and acknowledged that this teaching experience
provided them with a clearer perspective regarding whether or not they would
consider pursuing a career in academia. A student in planetary sciences shared her
view about why academia was more appealing as a career option:
I really like teaching and I really like the not-having-a-boss-business but
still have health insurance. I know, as a professor, I still have to deal with
committees and other stuff. But if I had gone into aerospace companies and
I had to report to managers all the time! I’d much rather be independent and
I’m much happier that way. I really like to have health insurance and a stable
income. So professors just seem to be a nice condition of that whereas research
scientists you just always have to be worried about where your funding comes
from. It’s not stable and you don’t get to teach. Those are major disadvantages.
This student compared the pros and cons between working in industry, in academia
as a professor, or as a research scientist. A high degree of academic freedom appeared
to be a major reason that attracted her to academia. Compared to being a research
scientist, teaching became a major factor that made her lean towards the decision to
become a professor.

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An engineering student who had experience working in the industry prior to

attending graduate school considered the aspect of interacting with students to be
particularly appealing. She commented:
I love interacting with students and conducting research to contribute to the
field of civil engineering. I found it very rewarding to mentor students and pass
my knowledge to them. Universities keep people more up-to-date with our
profession and the research while the industry just requires us to do the same
thing every day for many years.
Her view on “mentoring students” represented the views of many other student
participants who also wanted to pursue a career in academia.
It is noteworthy that there was a slight difference when it came to physical
sciences and engineering doctoral students’ career alternatives to the academic path.
Women interviewed in this study discussed their concerns and even fear of entering
academia. Yet, for physical sciences women students, the major career alternatives
were concentrated in postdoctoral and researcher positions in governmental
laboratories and research institutes, such as NASA research centers or other national
labs. Engineering women in this study who decided to forego an academic career
however were more inclined to join industry.
Many women in this study cited the stress associated with grant writing and
supporting graduate students to be the number one reason that would stop them
from entering academia. A fourth-year student shared her concerns about academic
careers:
I’m particularly worried about those times of the year when a professor needs
to write grants. Professors have deadlines and so many people depending on
them. It seems that all students need you to be there all the time. They need
money, funding, advice, resources and it goes on and on. At least in the industry
you’re not worried about money. That really takes pressure off from you.
She focused on the financial aspect of being a professor and expressed her
concerns over the “difficulty to obtain funding.” She further stated that although
she really enjoyed the teaching and researching sides of an academic career, having
to constantly apply for research funding and supporting research laboratories and
graduate students made her hesitant about pursuing such a career.
Another woman, who was studying environmental engineering, spoke about the
application of her research results being more likely to occur in industry than in
academia. She further discussed her concern that although her research results could
be published in the academic world, she was not sure how many people would read
the journal articles. Thus, she was worried that her hard work would not “pay off” in
the sense of her ideas being applied and turned into commercial products. This view
was widely held by many engineering students in this study.

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One woman doctoral student discerned a fairly common practice among

engineering faculty members who demonstrated a high level of involvement in
industry and entrepreneurial activities:
The men in our department have their PEs [licenses for professional engineers]
and have worked in the industry before. One of the professors has his own
company and he is pretty much going to quit sometime and just focus on that.
But I don’t really see that with the women professors. That’s interesting. Also,
talking with other people about how hard it is to get the PE gives me some
perspective. I keep asking myself: “Do I really want to do that? Is it important
to actually do it in I want to stay in academia?” Industry really likes it if you
have PE. They like it if you have it in Civil more than just Environmental. A
lot of the faculty in the department do have PE. Faculty who have their own
business, who are entrepreneurs, are more likely to have an open mind in terms
of our career choices.
As indicated in the comment above, a majority of the student participants
mentioned the opportunities for male faculty to become entrepreneurs while retaining
their academic positions, but it was noted that women faculty rarely had the same
choice. This observation triggered some discussions among student interviewees on
the idea that male doctoral students could possibly have both academic and industry
careers, while women were less likely to experience dual careers in their futures.
This would be especially true for foreign students, male or female, given insufficient
exposure to the private sector during their doctoral education. An F-1 student visa
does not allow students to work off-campus, which caused additional barriers to
many foreign students, who were excluded from any training in the industry during
their doctoral studies.1
For married Chinese women scientists and engineers, career decisions were more
likely to be driven by their husbands’ career advancement.2 Some of them had moved
to the U.S. as secondary immigrants. They may have more difficulties finding jobs,
particularly those that match with their career and educational experience. Goyette
and Xie’s study was the first of the kind to systemically study immigrant women
scientists’ and engineers’ employment, earnings, and promotions.3 They found that
while immigrant men were promoted at similar rates compared to native-born men,
immigrant women were promoted at much lower rates compared to both immigrant
men and native-born women. Their analysis results not only pointed out the
importance of considering gender when it comes to studying immigrant scientists
and engineers but also revealed the extreme disadvantages that immigrant women
scientists are facing.
Several professors in physical sciences programs summarized the employment
trends in their fields. They posited that in the physical sciences, students’ possibilities
of going into industry were slightly smaller compared to students in engineering. For

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example, an astronomy professor pointed out that 45 percent of her department’s

graduates went into academia, and another 45 percent went to work for governmental
laboratories, such as NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or the National Optical
Astronomical Observatory. Approximately 10 percent of all physical sciences
doctoral students go into industry upon graduation. In astronomy, the concept of
“industry” is limited to aerospace corporations that build telescopes or instruments
for telescopes. Sometimes these companies are sponsored by government funding of
research for national defense purposes. However, another professor in the physical
sciences stated that the national laboratories’ research styles were very similar to
the ones in academia. For this reason she did not adjust her ways of mentoring for
students who had different career trajectories. She claimed that the students just
needed to “slightly adjust the way they do research” to fit in with the style of the new
research teams that they will be joining.
A woman doctoral student who specialized in the planetary sciences reflected on
a common perception that was reported by many other women student interviewees
in physical sciences departments:
It’s true that you have to go to an institution that wants your kind of researcher.
So maybe one university does more research based on instrument work but I
have zero instrumentation training. So they won’t select me regardless of how
qualified I am as a scientist. So it’s kind of like a vicious cycle and it narrows
down the candidates whereas NASA is much more broad. For example, you
will still be assigned to a team that has somewhat of a research specialization
but you will be working on different missions with so many scientists who not
only have specialization but also a broader perspective on research in general.
This student participant realized the advantage that a career in a national laboratory
had over academia early in her doctoral studies. So she worked as a NASA research
fellow over several summers in order to establish a good working relationship
with various NASA research centers around the country. However, these kinds of
opportunities are rare among Chinese-born women scientists as they usually require
citizenship status and often security clearances.

DISCUSSING CAREER EXPECTATIONS WITH ADVISERS

The surprising reality is that it was rather common for Chinese women students
to express their fear of speaking to their advisers about future career preparations.
Their perception was that talking too much about career development would make
their advisers think that they were not dedicated to research and thus negatively
affect the ways that they were perceived by their advisers. Many of them only start
to look for a job after graduation, which puts them at an extreme disadvantage given
their insufficient preparation and understanding of the U.S. job market and their visa
constraints.

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Students mostly perceived their faculty advisers’ career expectations for them
as the traditional academic route. Thus, several women discussed their concerns
regarding “effectively communicating” with their advisers regarding their non-
academic career aspirations. One student mentioned her intention to teach at a four-
year college where she could have more interactions with undergraduate students.
However, her adviser reacted strongly after she discussed such an idea with him.
He told this student, “You were better prepared than that [teaching at a four-year
college].” This student stopped communicating with her adviser after that encounter
and started applying for postdoctoral positions on her own.
This pattern was also revealed during interviews with several other women
doctoral students who had career aspirations to teach at a community college or a
four-year college. They did not receive much feedback on their decisions from their
male advisers and they perceived such “lack of directions” as due to their advisers
“bias towards research universities.” The majority of women interviewed had been
in their doctoral programs for longer than three years. However, very few of them
had discussed their career trajectories with their advisers due to their concerns about
their considerations of non-academic career trajectories.
One space physics woman discussed her observations among her colleagues who
had graduated recently and the way her adviser commented on the career outcomes
of these peers:
My adviser had a few students before me and most of them didn’t end up
doing research in space physics. Some of them went into finance and that’s
completely different from what we are trained for in the field. She definitely
doesn’t like that. I know that because she pointed out to us how off-track those
students are at our research meetings.
This student’s comment illustrates the communication dilemma between women
students and their advisers when it comes to career trajectories. Some faculty do
perceive academia as the only appropriate career path for doctoral students after the
long period of doctoral training. Yet, some advisers try not to bring up the discussion
of career due to their concerns of being stereotyped as a professor who “only wants to
see their students to be in academia.” A chemical engineering student commented on
this matter and her view was fairly representative among women doctoral students
in this study:
So I think advisers generally prefer when their students go into academia
because their reputation seems to be based on how many students they have
placed in top-tier universities. I have definitely heard some ironic comments
that he made about his students who went into the industry. So I think that was
the subtle warning that he was giving to all of us. But we actually never had a
conversation [about career] yet. I’m not planning on going to academia but I’m
kind of scared to tell him that.

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This student based her assumptions about her adviser’s attitudes towards career
goals on her observations of comments he’d made about former students’ career
outcomes. In some cases, participants discussed how they had delayed their career
discussions due to their assumptions about what kind of career path their advisers
preferred.
It is important to note that mentoring relationships are bidirectional. Women
doctoral students are not the only ones doing observations and making assumptions
about their future career paths based on their advisers and peers’ career choices and
outcomes. Professors also make substantive observations and subconsciously base
their mentoring styles on the ways their doctoral students interact and communicate
with them. As one professor posited:
Some students flip back and forth, but you can see that this student will go
into academia and this one not because they’re more active with research,
publishing their work, and so forth. Some are satisfied with one or two papers,
others write five papers, and sometimes you don’t even ask them, they come
back after a weekend, “Oh, I wrote this.” So those are the kind of people
that will go into academia. I spend a lot of time helping them to publish and
improve their writing skills because they normally take the initiative.
This professor’s comments clearly indicated that students who have not decided
to go into academia were at a disadvantage when it came to training and publishing
opportunities. A second professor (from engineering) specifically discussed the
importance of women students’ socialization in academic careers early on, even
prior to entering graduate school:
I think it has to do with the education early on. Female students should be more
aware of the fact that it’s not that tough to go into academia. A lot of them enter
graduate school with preconceived notion that it is a lot easier to go to industry.
So only a small fraction of our female students want to go into academia.
And those who are in academia are doing pretty well. We have several women
professors in the department and they are all doing pretty well. One of them
even has children!
This engineering professor’s view was somewhat representative of the male
physical sciences and engineering professors.
Many female professors interviewed stressed the importance of “educating”
women students about what an academic career is during their undergraduate studies.
They almost all cited examples from their female colleagues to demonstrate that
being a women professor was “not difficult at all.” However, the female professors
participating in this study interpreted their working lives in a rather different
manner; none of them mentioned how easy or difficult it was to manage their
academic careers and family lives. Interestingly, they were more likely to focus on
the possibility of pursuing academic careers for their women doctoral students.

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One particular woman professor was very honest and explained that an academic
career for women was not easy. She shared her experience in dealing with efforts to
obtain tenure coupled with childcare duties. She ended up getting tenure a few years
later than her male counterparts who started the program around the same time she
did. She explained:
It is definitely not an easy thing to do. But I did it. I know it’s not for everyone.
That’s why I don’t push my women students to go into academia. I would sit
down and talk to them about how they feel about their graduate program and
then ask them what they really want to do. For the ones who are passionate
about going into academia, I’m honest with them about all the difficulties that
they need to overcome. Then I’ll provide them with publication and network
strategies on how to land a postdoc position.
Three women professors interviewed shared similar strategies for mentoring
women doctoral students who are considering academic careers. However, male
faculty showed less understanding towards women students’ concerns regarding
work-life balance. Several male professors in the physical sciences stated that
scientific careers needed to be pursued with passion, and that real scientists would
and should be willing and able to sacrifice many things for their passion. This point
can be sufficiently reflected by a space science professor’s viewpoint:
I think when people start to talk about careers, for me the game is already over
because science is not a career. One shouldn’t think of it as a career. To me,
career is a business school or something like. I don’t care about that. A career is
a way of life and how to live your life. So I’m not really interested and I never
talk about careers to students because to me that’s a huge red flag. Sometimes
people come to ask me, can I have a good career in astronomy or planetary
science, and I know that person shouldn’t be in science. They should be in a
firm at Wall Street.
This professor’s perception was quite common among the male professors I
spoke to. Many had strongly expressed the views that they expect their students
to focus 100 percent on scientific inquiries and discourage them from discussing
or even thinking about career preparation. They thought that if they were serious
enough about science, jobs would come their way. This kind of belief was quite
commonly held by many Chinese women scientists and engineers, thus resulting in
career unpreparedness and missed opportunities for many.

STUDENT PERCEPTIONS OF ACADEMIC CAREERS

On the students’ side, many productive and scholarly-oriented Chinese women

shared their views about pursuing an academic career after graduate school. They
expressed interest and passion in the research they were doing; however, not all of

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them had made a firm decision about becoming an academic from the beginning
of their doctoral studies. A woman student from engineering shared that she never
thought that doing a PhD meant that she had to become a professor. She regarded
getting a PhD as the necessary step to becoming a researcher rather than a professor.
She did not start her doctoral program thinking, “This is what I need to do in order
to become a professor.” She also acknowledged the difficulties of finding a job that
many of her peers faced and said she was not going to be picky once she completed
her PhD.
Many women doctoral students formed their own speculations based on observing
other peers’ career outcomes and their advisers’ research, grant applications, and
teaching activities. Some of them expressed their concerns pertaining to the “long
work hours,” “ability to secure external funding,” “pressure to support research labs
and graduate students,” and lack of “passion and dedication about research.” These
major reasons were identified by interviewees who had academic career aspirations
at the beginning as to why they changed their minds about pursing an academic
career. A woman student in engineering discerned:
Motivation is the most important quality of being a professor, especially if you
want to be somebody’s adviser. You have to be motivated yourself to motivate
other people. If I’m not interested in what I’m doing, how can I do that? Also,
professors in this department all have crazy lifestyles. My adviser is normally
in the lab from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. He’s putting a lot of energy into this and for
some reason his energy does not go down for all this time. I’m exhausted after
5! I feel that I’m kind of weak in that sense.
This participant’s observation echoed a major concern of the majority of the
interviewees regarding the demanding lifestyle that academic positions require.
A similar point was made by a fifth-year physical sciences student about to begin
her very first postdoctoral position. She reflected on the changes in her views that
occurred during her doctoral study and concluded:
I think I’m probably less inclined towards academia than I was when I came
in, just because it seems like a kind of like a rat race. Everybody is just fighting
over these very few positions and once you get into that position it doesn’t
necessarily become easier. And I’m not saying it’s going to be easier if you
become a researcher at a national lab. But I think it’s very safe to stay in
academia because that’s what we’ve been doing for the past decade and it’s all
that we know. I’m not ruling it out for the future but right now unless I have to
I’m probably less inclined to go into academia.
This interviewee had an interesting observation about the purpose of doctoral
education. She pointed out the shortcomings: “It narrows down my areas to such a large
extent and I don’t feel comfortable doing anything else but my own research project.”
She also expressed her concerns over her “inadequate training” in a broader scheme of
research and felt it would hinder her ability to look for a job outside of academia.

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Several doctoral women discussed the “isolating” nature of academic jobs, and
their graduate school experience somewhat confirmed such assumptions. Many of
them were very concerned about their ability to generate original ideas for research
proposals, which is closely tied into grant applications and the achievement of
tenure:

The reason why I’m less interested in staying in space physics is that I feel
like it’s easy to work on something but it’s difficult to come up with original
ideas. And that is not something that I feel like I’ve gained strength in graduate
school. Academic life is sometimes too isolating and graduate school was kind
of like that too. We just sit in front of our computers and analyze data all day
long. We don’t talk to people and we don’t meet new people. It’s not what
I want for the rest of my life. I wanted to do something that involves more
interaction with people.

Besides the discussion of concerns regarding the generation of original ideas,

this participant also addressed her concerns regarding the “isolating” nature of
daily academic life. Among the women students who were one year or less away
from completing their doctoral programs in this study, a majority had entered their
graduate programs with academic career trajectories. Yet, about 80 percent of them
changed their mind two to three years into their programs. Some of them decided
to go into national labs or industry, while others decided to leave their disciplines
and pursue completely different career paths, often finance, which can present
increasingly lucrative opportunities to those who excel in data analysis.

CAREER ALTERNATIVES

There is one final career option for women with sophisticated mathematical skills.
An increasingly attractive choice for Chinese women in physics is the finance
industry, an area that does not directly utilize their scientific or engineering skills but
taps into their expertise with computers, mathematics, and data analysis. There are
many opportunities in this field, it is quite lucrative, and it is not subject to the same
security considerations. Large finance companies are even willing to sponsor foreign
employees’ work visas. This choice was not uncommon among interviewed physics
doctoral students, as stated by one student participant:

When I entered the program, I basically only wanted to go into academia. As

time went by, I realized that there’s some type of personality that I’m missing
for that kind of position. I might have to find a job in finance. That’s actually the
destiny of a lot of physics students. They find jobs in finance because basically
it’s just data analysis. We have very good math and physics background due
to our training in coding and programming. Finance firms love people with
physics background.

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This point was brought up many times by student interviewees in this study.
They discussed the high numbers of doctoral recipients in their fields who leave
for the field of finance, including many women. They all agreed that the finance
industry path was the least preferred among physics doctoral students. However, the
competitive pay and less demanding work style of the finance industry attracts many
women graduates.
The discussions about career alternatives besides the traditional academic route
focused on the comparisons regarding advantages and shortcomings between
academic careers and counterparts in industry and national laboratories. As indicated
above, the engineering women students interviewed who turned down academia as
their first career choice reported more interest in entering industry. On the other
hand, women physical sciences students in this study were more likely to join the
workforce by entering national laboratories upon graduation.
Data from the current project also revealed the enabling assumption that women
students were not often invited to participate in their advisers’ industry research.
None of the Chinese women scientists and engineers were involved in any industry-
related research and work through their doctoral advisers’ connections. In rare cases,
some minimal tasks were handled by these women but they had little knowledge of
the bigger picture and were not able to see the impact of their research outcomes in
a business sense. Thus, they missed out on many off-campus/industry opportunities
in their graduate school training and then early on in their careers. Compared to
their male counterparts, they were less likely to be engaged in industry consulting
projects. If power is connected to these consultancies, women were being stripped
away these power sources early in their careers. They must thus seek other resources
to live in the scarcity of margin established by powerful and often male networks.
If private sector consulting experience is considered to be part of career preparation
of graduate education, then nearly all of the women students in this study almost
entirely missed any industry practice and exposure.
This finding changes the way we conceptualize the graduate education of women
in science and engineering. It is not enough to simply add women into the assessment.
It is critical to learn these so-called “facts” from women’s perspectives. The ways
they see things and interpret things may have not been considered the “correct”
ways but they are certainly crucial to understanding an ever-expanding foreign-born
science and engineering workforce.

NOTES
1
An F-1 visa is issued to international students who study in the U.S. It is only valid while someone is
a full-time student and does not allow employment outside of the institution of study.
2
Nan L. Maxwell, “Economic Returns to Migration: Marital Status And Gender Differences,” Social
Science Quarterly 69 (1988): 108–121.
3
Kimberly Goyette and Yu Xie. 1999. “The Intersection of Immigration and Gender: Labor Force
Outcomes of Immigrant Women Scientists.” Social Science Quarterly 80 (2): 395–408.

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CHALLENGES AND STEREOTYPES

Despite the large number of Chinese students in American science and engineering
programs, they are largely segregated from their American peers. A lack of common
understanding and common interests between Chinese and American students have
been reported by many scholars in the past two decades.1 Science and engineering
doctoral programs in the U.S. have a unique situation: Some of these programs
enroll a high percentage of Chinese students. For example, over 50 percent of some
computer science departments’ students were Chinese.
This unique student demographic makeup poses both challenges and advantages.
The advantages brought about by this phenomenon will be further discussed in later
chapters regarding the transnational networks of Chinese scientists and engineers.
This chapter focuses particularly on common challenges faced by Chinese-born
women scientists and engineers.
The increasingly larger number of Chinese students in U.S. science and
engineering programs has not brought about increasing levels of integration
and intercultural communication among Chinese and American students. This
phenomenon creates extra burdens for Chinese women in these programs as they
are constantly coping with the dual identities of being a woman and a foreigner in
the field. The data collected in this study showed little interaction between Chinese
women scientists and their American counterparts outside of research projects and
coursework.
The weekly informal meetings between Chinese women scientists and engineers
served as a central hub for sharing key organizational information and strategies. These
meetings were usually hosted by the more senior women in the group and usually took
the form of a potluck. It took approximately one year into my fieldwork for me to build
up enough trust to be included in these meetings. A more senior woman earth science
researcher told me that some of the members in this group were concerned about my
presence at these informal gatherings due to the sensitive topics discussed there. Yet,
these meetings were invaluable to me as they confirmed and validated some of my
observations and interview patterns/findings. Some of the key challenges that these
women were facing and the tacit knowledge and coping strategies highlighted in this
chapter were gained through this invaluable source.

WORK-LIFE BALANCE

The number one barrier that hindered all participating women doctoral students
from pursuing academic careers was doubt about work-life balance. This was

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especially prominent among the Chinese women students as they were facing a
tremendous amount of societal pressure regarding marriage and family. In essence,
these women were worried about being single when they past the age of 30, as they
are given the name of sheng nü or leftover women and this will make it less possible
to find a ideal partner to marry. The patriarchal Chinese culture has also perpetuated
the belief of many men that women should not have higher degree levels or more
significant jobs, as they feel they should first be a “mother and wife.”
“Work-life balance” is a concept that refers to proper prioritization between job
and life. Job indicates career, promotion, or ambition, while “life” indicates family
and leisure-related activities.2 In the case of this study, “work” refers to women
students’ perceptions and concerns regarding academic careers and “life” indicates
their desires about starting a family, having a “stable” life, having children, and
having a less stressful lifestyle. Almost all women interviewed in this study discussed
significant “changes” in their private lives during their doctoral studies. These
changes mainly consisted of meeting significant others, getting married, breaking
up from long-term relationships, or interning in their industry. A sixth-year student
shared her career moves and how they were based on her relationship status:
Before I started the graduate school, I would have said the science is the
Number One. I think it pretty much still is except that I have a boyfriend now
and I tried to get a fellowship in the same city. He’s a working professional.
I actually just got one postdoc offer last Thursday. So I will be working for
this research center that is close to his work. That’s only one of the reasons
for me to get a postdoc there rather than somewhere else. But if the work
isn’t interesting or new or original, then I don’t know if it’s worth doing even
though I can get some papers out. They won’t be good papers. In that case, I
don’t think it’s worth it. I definitely think science is important but I can’t leave
my personal life behind.
This interviewee also expressed concerns regarding the outlook for her to pursue
academic positions. Her postdoctoral researcher appointment was one year. She
mentioned that she would need to look for a faculty position six months before her
postdoctoral work ends, which does not give her much time to further her research
and to publish. She acknowledged that her top concern when it came to a permanent
job was to be in the same city with her significant other. However, the few universities
that recruit faculty in her research area are not in “desired locations.”
Another woman who recently became engaged spoke about the difficulty for dual
science couples to secure jobs in the same region, let alone the same institution.
She reflected on her colleagues’ experiences and speculated that “one person in the
dual science couple needs to go into industry or completely change her/his field.”
She expressed her career choice dilemma in one of the interviews:
If I do enter academia, I’d probably need to do many postdocs. And I’m really
tired of not being settled. My fiancée and I want to buy a house but we can’t

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do it until we actually know we’re going to be living at some place for longer
than a couple of years. So I’d really like to settle down and go to wherever he
ends up going. I realize that if I chose to go into academic career, then that
would be at least another five years of instability. And that’s not something
that I care to do.
This research participant revealed her willingness to “give up science entirely”
and pursue other career paths given that her significant other was a much stronger
candidate than her to pursue an academic career.
Another common perspective shared by several women students was the change
in their views over the years regarding “choosing an academic career,” or even
pursuing a career in science at all. Many discussed how they thought an “academic
career was the only way to do real science and research” before they entered their
doctoral programs, yet as four or five years passed by, many of them realized that
science was not the “only important thing” in their lives. One student elaborated her
thought transformation on this topic:
My mind has changed in the sense that I think I had a lot stronger sense of
academic career aspirations when I first came in. I was very focused and I
wanted to make space the thing in my life. My first year kind of reflected
that. I was in the office all the time. I had two papers out and I think I knew
what I was doing. But then I got a little burnt out and started searching for
more meaningful things outside of academia and career. I met my husband in
graduate school and we recently got married. I found a lot of friendships and
fulfillment outside of work. And then still kind of balancing the two together.
So as far as my career aspirations, I think it has become less of the focus. I
realized that I wasn’t finding fulfillment in what I was doing. Sitting in the
office all day in front of the computer is just not that meaningful.
The reasons this student changed her priorities between her science career and her
personal life were not surprising. She started to “enjoy her life” rather than “sit in
front of her computer all day long.” She further noted that graduate school offered
her a “preview of academic careers’ isolated nature” and how she does not want that
to be part of her life. Further, the “greedy nature” of both an academic career and
childcare responsibilities pose additional doubts in the minds of women doctoral
students. One woman student mentioned that Chinese parents are highly involved in
their grandchildren’s upbringing, and that not having her parents close by made her
doubt if she could handle the demanding nature of academic and family life (with
children) at the same time.
Their concerns regarding having both a career and children were considerable.
All of the women discussed in various degrees their worries about having a child
while working towards tenure if they decided to go into academia. One engineering
woman’s view reflected this common concern among all student participants in
this study:

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Even if I married a man who wants to be a stay-at-home dad, I still don’t see
how I can have kids. I’d like to have a personal life, have kids one day, and go
on vacation for a week sometimes. I think a smaller institution will be a little
bit more accommodating of that because they are not pressuring you to publish.
But we don’t have any woman faculty who have kids in the department! That
really worries me. There must be a reason behind that.
Although work-life balance-related concerns turned out to be one of the top
reasons why doctoral students decided to avoid academic careers, female and
male faculty perceived this kind of phenomenon rather differently. Women faculty
reported that they were more likely to be approached by female doctoral students
in their departments regarding their work-life balance concerns. Male faculty
participants, on the other hand, failed to mention any incidents where they engaged
female students in conversation about concerns regarding having a family and how
it could affect their academic careers.
One particular physical sciences male professor phrased his perceptions in a
somewhat “male-centric” way and could somewhat represent a fairly common view
among male faculty on the issue of “family or to career:”
One of the most promising students I ever had, she quit and got married! I
can say that’s a 100 percent family distraction and that seems to affect women
much more than men. I was kind of disappointed but that story had a happy
ending. She eventually came back after quitting and finished her degree. But
she could have then probably been a leading member of the field if she didn’t
quit. Maybe she could still be something impressive but clearly is not going to
be the leader. She could have been a professor at a top-tier university without
too much difficulty. But she did not. She had a life choice and we hardly see a
life choice like that with men.
Without too much interpretation, this professor’s comment clearly delivered
the message that “he was disappointed” in the fact that one of his most promising
women doctoral students quit her doctoral studies and got married. He made a very
interesting assumption that “she could have become one of the leading scholars in
her field,” but now “it is hardly possible.”
On the other hand, women faculty in physical sciences and engineering, while
acknowledging that “having a family and children” was not an easy thing to do
in academia, provided advice and served as role models for women students. One
physical sciences women professor noted:
If they’re married and have a child, it [being an woman academic] becomes
very difficult. So some women delay the whole process and then they are
competing with men in their field. It’s natural how they always feel maybe they
are behind. But we have female faculty in the school who are doing as well
as male. So women can totally do it but it’s just a lot more difficult than men.

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Another woman professor discussed how she used her own example to advise
women doctoral students who approached her with questions about starting a family
and having children. Additionally, she pointed out the “implicit bias” imposed by
male counterparts in the organization:

I started my faculty position right out of graduate school and got tenure in
my early thirties. The same year when I was expecting tenure, I got pregnant.
The first kid was born approximately the time I got tenure. So I was able to
swing it. There is another woman professor in my department who actually had
her first child before she got tenure by about a year but by that time you will
accomplish what you’re going to accomplish. The only thing working against
you really is bias in the department and that’s not insignificant.

Even though women faculty are great role models in demonstrating the
possibility of having an academic career and a balanced personal life, bias and
institutionalized discrimination against women with families remain common in
academia.

CHILDREN

Many Chinese women scientists and engineers move to the U.S. with their
significant others, or establish relationships after they arrive. Many of these Chinese
couples decide to have children while they are both in graduate school. During the
past five years, it has become a prevalent strategic move adopted by many Chinese
scientist couples. Based on the data I collected, there were three major reasons for
this phenomenon:
Flexible work schedule: PhD programs consist of only some intensive
coursework while the rest of the program entails analyzing data and writing a
dissertation, which gives women great flexibility in terms of work hours.
Health insurance: students are covered by great medical insurance during their
doctoral studies, which creates low-cost health care for both the mother and child.
Citizenship status: many Chinese scientist/engineer couples are concerned about
their immigration status after graduation and whether their future children can
benefit from the U.S. education system. By having their children while in the U.S.,
citizenship is automatically granted to their newborn and thus alleviates their stress
over long-term immigration plans for the entire family.
With these benefits in mind, many young married Chinese couples in science
and engineering programs are deciding to enter parenthood during their doctoral
candidacy stage. However, this practice has created additional financial and
psychological burdens among Chinese women doctoral students and postdocs.
Nearly all of the women doctoral students or postdocs named the top two challenges
as child-bearing and work-life balance.

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DROPPING OUT AND MENTAL HEALTH

During my nearly a decade of fieldwork, multiple Chinese women that I was studying
dropped out of physical sciences and engineering doctoral programs. A postdoc who
was close to one of the people who dropped out expressed concerns for Chinese
women’s outlook in chemical engineering:
She dropped out this year due to lack of funding, one dropped out last year
was a girl from Taiwan, and when I first got here, I had heard about a girl
in our department who did [drop out]. But I’ve never heard of guys doing
that. I actually heard of a girl leav[ing] after four years with a master’s degree
because she was just so fed up and she was done!
Other participants also shared similar observations. Many in the physical sciences
also reported that they saw some women dropping out from their doctoral programs
after many years in the program. These dropped-out students were likely to be
international. A doctoral candidate in earth sciences reflected on a recent incident –
one of her close friends dropped from the program after three years – sharing a fear
that a lot of student participants were facing:
It [doctoral program] takes a lot out of you so I can’t imagine starting over. But
some people do [drop out], more in the beginning, like after their first year.
Maybe they feel like this is just not going to work and why struggle? Which I
think is okay. I mean, after your first … maybe after your second year, if you
still can’t get adjust[ed] to the new environment and it’s just so unbearable, but
after that, it’s like, you leave with a master’s degree [for] all these years’ work.
It’s scary. I don’t know what I would do.
The phenomenon described above among physical sciences women doctoral
students was prevalent. The interviewed students and faculty both reported a higher
dropout rate for women due to funding, family, and mentoring relationships, and
visa-related barriers. One Chinese woman physicist was experiencing depression
due to the high pressure in her doctoral program and negative interactions with her
adviser. She discussed the reasons why women were more likely to drop out from
their physics doctoral programs based on her first-hand experience:
Graduate school in the U.S. basically deteriorated my confidence. As time
goes by, I just realized that I’m becoming dumber and dumber. It’s a very sad
realization for me as I had always been the top of the class in China. But I
think that’s what American graduate school does to a lot of people. It actually
tells them whether or not [they are] bright enough and strong enough to finish
graduate school. So sometimes I feel like maybe I’m not made for this. Maybe
I’ve chosen a wrong career path to begin with.
This woman’s experiences illustrates one serious problem that many women
participants reported suffering from – mental health issues. There is a stigma

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associated with mental disorders in Chinese culture such that none of the women
who suffered from mental problems either sought professional help or revealed their
condition to other women in the science and engineering community.
Since I had originally brought up the topic of mental health and shared some
research studies on the percentage of women scientists who suffered from mental
diseases worldwide, I gained a reputation as a therapist. Many women scientists came
to me for advice when it came to their anxiety and depression. Some of the cases
were quite severe and I ended up having to recommend therapists and encouraging
them to contact professionals who could help.
The lack of formal supporting mechanisms for international women students
in physical sciences and engineering programs was one of the major reasons why
some intelligent and qualified women scientists who had invested years of their
professional and personal lives to graduate study decided to drop out. A fourth-year
engineering student compared Chinese female students and American male students’
confidence levels:
They [American students] are definitely more confident. They can openly
point out to my adviser if he said something wrong. They are very confident.
Even though they don’t know what they are talking about, they pretend to be
confident. That’s something that I’m definitely missing. They can basically
stand up for themselves.
The same engineer shared that she was very intimidated during her first two
years in the doctoral program. She said that she was scared to go to group meetings,
felt challenged by her American colleagues (both male and female), and never felt
adequately prepared to pose challenging questions to her adviser. As time went by
however, she realized that “American students don’t always know what they were
talking about.” So she gradually built up confidence and started challenging her
American peers and adviser on the ideas that she wasn’t sure about. “It actually got
me a lot more credibility and respect.”

STEREOTYPES OF DOCILE CHINESE WOMEN

The majority of the women in this study noted that some senior male colleagues
and professors often pigeonholed them as docile and submissive. These incidents
not only occurred during these doctoral women’s daily interactions, but also during
professional collaborations and conference presentations, as well as in the workplace.
The topic of being considered as docile Chinese women constantly came up at the
informal gatherings. One doctoral student who had just joined the group was warned
by her peers that her adviser had a reputation for despising his women students’
work and “stealing” their work with minimal credit given to them. This group of
Chinese women were regularly given heavy loads of work, with short notice; they
were also expected to produce results with minimal supervision and attention, and
often without adequate resources. One Chinese engineer pointed out, “I think this

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is attributive to the fact that Asians are considered to be the model minority. We
are often given hard tasks with minimal directions. Plus, they think we [Chinese
women] are submissive and cooperative so we won’t complain too much.”
One reason that these women remained silent and did not object when they were
taken advantage of was that they were dependent on the approval of those above
them for their visas, and hence their scholarships, without which they could not
remain in the U.S. This was mentioned previously but deserves repeating. The
topic of visa restrictions came up every summer and fall as some members in the
group began looking for jobs. Discussion and small talk among Chinese scientists
and engineers regularly focused around F-1 visa sponsorship and the H-1B visa’s
disadvantages. H-1B visas are for foreign personnel who work in the U.S. Most
Chinese-born scientists and engineers have to go through a stringent selection and
application process in order to obtain H-1B visas; this process as seen as worthwhile,
though, since this visa often leads to permanent residency.
The more senior Chinese women in the group would often discuss the limitations
of H-1B visas and what the newly-minted PhDs should watch out for. The H-1B
visa holders in the group constantly spoke about being exploited by their employers
in the form of less pay, extra work, fewer promotional opportunities, and little
support from management levels. In some cases, their employers refused to apply
for permanent residency for them as they were trying to hold them as “cheap labor”
for as long as they could. That is why successfully obtaining U.S. permanent
residency or citizenship becomes a milestone event. Whenever this kind of “event”
coincided with one of their meetings, the whole tone of the meeting transformed
from “venting” and “strategizing” to celebratory.
A soon-to-graduate doctoral candidate in a physical sciences program discussed
multiple instances of “not being taken seriously” due to her gender and nationality.
She described issues that occurred not only at conferences but also in her daily work
environment. In one such instance, she heard some “old male geologists talking
about how all the changes [more women and foreigners in the field] are destroying
the field.” She was very stunned by this “off-hand and sexist and racist” comment.
Although these men were not her professors, biases across physical sciences and
engineering programs were sometimes voiced openly:
We do get some very off-hand comments sometimes from professors and
collaborators. And I’ve heard stories and I’ve had things said to me. Like, once
somebody said to me that he thought it was better for me to assume that women
were worse in science because then you can start to fix the problem. I was like,
“Really? I can’t believe you are saying that to me!” Despite of all the research,
teaching, and networking stuff, we still have to deal with this, the very subtle
stuff. I also got my accent laughed at a lot. You know, my constant mistake of
mixing letter “R” with “L.” Sometimes I think my accent is stopping me from
advancing in this field in the U.S.

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This student admitted that she did not know what to do the first time she heard
this kind of comment, and that she was stunned that such “old school thought”
still existed. Yet, she and the others were learning how to defend and negotiate for
themselves in similar situations. In my conversations with these women, we had
many in-depth discussions about the patterns of implicit gender bias. “Pattern” here
indicates the characteristics of the people whose comments or behaviors are more
likely to exhibit gender bias.
Surprisingly, most women participants reported that gender and nationality-based
biases were not only held by the older generation of professors and scholars, but
that some younger male colleagues also behaved the same way. A Chinese postdoc
shared one of her encounters at a prestigious astronomy conference:
I had a poster and it was right next to one of the very well respected people
[who had] posted in our field. We did like a little roundtable where everybody
talked for thirty seconds about their posters, so I talked about mine. I think it
went pretty well, [but] then the guy next to me, instead of talking about his
poster, he talked about how mine was all wrong – which wasn’t actually true,
because he just wasn’t listening to a word I said – and completely missed the
whole point [of my poster] and misinterpreted my graphs, and [the experience]
was terrible.
Another area that Chinese women are constantly struggling with and need to
negotiate in has evolved from stereotypical gender roles. One of the postdocs I
interviewed pointed out that some women doctoral students or even postdocs should
turn down many gender-specific secretarial jobs: “They [some women postdocs
and graduate students] put themselves in a position where their professors can treat
them like secretaries.” It is not fair to assume that this kind of behavior from the
Chinese women is intentional. A senior woman computer scientist reflected:
Chinese students are taught to be respectful to their teachers from the first
day they enter school. Some of them proactively reach out to their advisers
to provide assistance out of good intentions and respect. But some advisers
wrongly perceived this gesture as they offered to run an errand or pick up a
coffee for me.

CHINESE BIAS

In addition to stereotypes of Chinese women, there was a certain amount of prejudice

towards the Chinese in general. Many participants in this study also discussed the
U.S. government’s mistrust and even imprisonment of ethnic Chinese scientists.
Most of these scientists had devoted their entire lives to American science and
engineering research yet were wrongly accused of stealing U.S. national secrets in
order to benefit their “home countries.”

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At one gathering, a second-year doctoral student brought Dr. Wen Ho Lee’s memoir
My Country Versus Me. Wen Ho Lee was a Taiwanese-born American scientist
who had devoted his life to serving the U.S. defense industry. He was wrongly
imprisoned and accused of stealing American military secrets for China. Although
the incident occurred in 1990, this story is still commonly repeated within the
Chinese scientist and engineer community. The book triggered much conversation
at the dinner that night over the topic of being the permanent outsider regardless of
immigration status.
Many women discussed their experience of being denied student visas after
multiple attempts to come to the U.S. due to their master’s and undergraduate
research on nuclear engineering, chemistry, or other topics that could potentially
threaten American national security. They were all excluded from military-funded
research projects. For those who were in special sciences, very few of them have had
the opportunity to get job offers from NASA national laboratories, a major source
of employment in their field. The few Asian women scientists who have made it to
NASA laboratories across the country have only been conducting basic scientific
research and assigned responsibilities such as designing and managing public
outreach programs. They are regularly laterally moved from one project to another
and never promoted to higher levels. They are never told about any part of the bigger
research.
Two women in their early 50s told me that they were reassigned to a new project
every time a NASA mission that they worked on ran out of funding but that there
were no institutionalized resources to help them. They would need to gather
information through informal networks of people and find out which research
team would be likely to hire scientists with their specializations. These two women
told me that they had drifted very far from their initial doctoral research and their
original goals for their scientific careers. Since they reached their 30s, they had
been constantly put into public outreach and service roles. As one male professor
put it: “You are good with elementary schools and you are so motherly! YOU
WILL FIT RIGHT IN!”
I was told that part of the nationality-based bias was reflected by some American
professors’ tendency to put their Chinese women students on the spot by assuming
that they represented all of the more than 1.3 billion Chinese people. For instance,
the Chinese women scientists had to constantly explain to the rest of the team or
class why there was internet censorship, why academic freedom was non-existent
in China, and why their nation had no respect for intellectual property. As a Chinese
postdoc nicely put it:
I am not the president of China and I do not represent all one-point-something
billion people. Just like all the issues in the U.S., they are complex and cannot
be explained within a two-minute window. Yet, Americans don’t see that. They
put me on the spot and I am constantly under pressure to defend China. This
is utterly ridiculous!

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At the time I was finalizing this book, the topic of nationality-based discrimination
was rekindled as two high profile Chinese-American scientists were arrested
on suspicion of espionage. They were National Weather Services employee
Sherry Chen in Ohio and Temple University physicist Xi Xiaoxing. The Chinese
scientists in this study expressed their discomfort and deep concern over the U.S.
government’s aggressive investigation of suspected espionage from the Chinese
scientific community.
Facing nationality-based discrimination, some senior Chinese women scientists
created strategies to cope with the situation, summarized these into four major areas
(in Chinese) and emailed this document to other Chinese women in the community.
These four strategies were: (1) when your adviser ignores you, do not be discouraged,
take the initiative yourself to learn more in graduate school; (2) the best resources
are senior peers in your group and postdocs next door who are there to answer your
questions; (3) research is about what you do and what you learn from other peers
in your group; and (4) your adviser might be famous, but chances are their names
won’t help you much if you do not take the initiative. Several women discussed
the fact that their departments’ cultures supported the notion of the “independent
researcher,” which indicated that doctoral students needed to take charge of their
own research and were expected to produce results by themselves.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY THEFT

The Chinese women scientists stated they had great difficulty protecting their
intellectual property, data, and results from their research. This severely impacted
their ability to publish their own work, which leads to difficulty in establishing
themselves in their fields and significantly limits their career opportunities.
Given the collaborative nature of many physical sciences and engineering
research projects, many researchers work on a single project and have access to
the data acquired by them all together. Many student participants believed that
when the project’s principal investigator, in most cases their doctoral adviser, did
not make explicit rules regarding authorship and intellectual property concerns,
Chinese women doctoral students, particularly the junior ones, were less likely to
be in the position to negotiate and thus the least likely to produce first-authored
publications.
A Chinese civil engineer who had just entered the workforce recalled her graduate
school experience. She spent six months compiling a database of testing results and
statistics from her three and a half years of research. Nearing completion of the
project, she went to her adviser to discuss publishing the data. However, the adviser
told her that this new product (the database) should be shared by all of his doctoral
students, particularly a new male member of the research team, who wanted use of
this database to publish his paper.
This engineer was very upset when her adviser told her to give this male student
access to her database and to work collaboratively with him. She wanted to talk

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to her adviser but was concerned she would be perceived as “selfish” and “overly
protective.” “I just wanted him to know that these are my results and my baby. I
don’t want other people to touch it,” she said with frustration. “I just need to really
stay encouraged and go and tell my adviser that I don’t feel comfortable sharing my
work before copyright[ing] it.”
These kind of murky intellectual property violations were widely reported by the
women in this study. Yet they did not know how to address the issue.

SEXUAL HARASSMENT

Many women scientists and engineers discussed the sexual harassment occurring in
their offices and labs, on research teams, and at conferences. These implicit forms of
sexual harassment posed challenges for women doctoral students to various degrees.
The common forms could be summarized as: (1) verbal sexual harassment by
peers or between advisers and advisees; (2) peer sexual harassment and advisers’
protective behaviors; and (3) sexual harassment from collaborating scholars who
are prospective employers of the students. Compared to the first two categories
of sexual harassment behaviors, the third type of sexual harassment identified
by interviewees directly sheds negative light on women doctoral students’ career
decision-making processes and the perplexities that confront them in terms of the
merit-based academic career selection process. These behaviors also hindered them
from establishing professional networks.
Due to the high sensitivity of this matter, I share some ethnographic data without
detailed descriptions of the individuals’ departmental affiliations or specific fields
of study to guarantee research participants’ confidentiality.
An outstanding oceanography Chinese doctoral student has received many awards
based on her cutting-edge research ever since she began her doctoral program in the
U.S. She reported an incident that had been bothering her for a long time:
There was this professor who has been collaborating with my research team
from another prestigious university. He is much older than me. This professor
was following me everywhere when I went to a conference last week. He asked
me out to dinner, coffee, and drinks at the conference, but I turned him down.
Then he offered me this opportunity to give a talk at his university on the
topics of my latest research. You know, that could get me a good job in his
department! I didn’t know what to do. After we returned from the conference,
he drove to my lab to see me today and we had coffee together. Over the coffee,
he grabbed my hand and asked me to go out with him! I’m very confused right
now. What do you think I should do?
I was stunned by such a question that put many responsibilities on me as an
ethnographer. But throughout the years of doing fieldwork with women scientists
and engineers, this was not the first time I had heard stories of this nature. This

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type of sexual harassment behavior and its potentially damaging nature could cause
much personal and professional damage to Chinese women doctoral students.
Although I debated writing on this topic throughout the authoring of this
book, the high frequency of these incidents eventually prompted me to report and
discuss this form of sexual harassment. By discussing this issue, I want to open
discussions in three different areas: (1) what this type of sexual harassment means
to Chinese women in the American context and how they should deal with it; (2) the
ethnographic researcher’s positionality; and (3) the researcher’s professional ethics
in cases of sensitive issues or even criminal behaviors.
Keep in mind that many universities in China do not have codes of conduct regarding
professor-student relationships. While it is not encouraged, it is still not uncommon
in China to see professor-student romantic relationships. This case is very different
in American academia but many Chinese women students were not aware of this.
Additionally, some of them were being taken advantage of because of their vulnerability
upon their arrival to a new country, a new academic environment, and a new culture.
It is easy for departments and institutions to overlook this form of sexual
harassment due to the fact that often the more senior male professors, scholars,
and/or researchers, the ones who most commonly initiate this kind of behavior, do
not belong to the same institution as the student. However, that should not change
the nature of this phenomenon given that it involves hierarchical relationships and
power dynamics. According to The Code of Federal Regulations, this type of sexual
harassment is termed quid pro quo, and is defined as “unwelcome sexual advances,
requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature
when submission to such conduct is made either explicitly or implicitly a term of
condition of an individual’s employment.”3
In the case described above, the professor did not work at the same institution as
the Chinese student, was in a higher position than her, and was promising to provide
potential career opportunities to her if she agreed to go out with him. The student
became very confused because she was uncomfortable with this situation, yet had a
great working relationship with this professor and had the false hope that he would
“find her a job” upon graduation.
Eventually, this woman scientist declined the offer and is now greatly suffering
from the consequences: She is no longer included in the collaborative research
project where the professor is the co-principal investigator and her peers have spread
hurtful gossip. She does not know to whom she can turn in this matter. It has created
a major barrier for her to continue her program, despite being only one year away
from graduation.
Researchers’ ethics become the central discussion topic when it comes to
encountering sexual harassment reports during their fieldwork, especially in
qualitative and ethnographic settings where researchers are exposed to research
participants’ everyday lives and are trying to record their lived experiences. The
interactions on a regular basis with women doctoral students has furthered my

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understanding of the culture and interactions among this group of women and with
their mentors; it has also blurred the line of researcher-researched. Over time, many
ethnographers/researchers become regarded by the communities they study as the
“therapists” of the community, and thus hear many stories that would not otherwise
be divulged. Sensitive issues such as sexual harassment and discrimination usually
require researchers to provide resources to those women and ask them to seek
professional counseling or report incidents to the appropriate authority. However,
the researchers should not report the issues without the participants’ consent. Many
Chinese immigrant women scientists are not aware of the resources available to
them and are thus confused about what to do when they are harassed.

NOTES
1
Feng, “The Adaptation of Students from the People’s Republic of China”; Huang and Klinger,
“Chinese Graduate Students at North American Universities.”
2
Emma Jeanes, David Knights, and Patricia Yancey Martin, Handbook of Gender, Work and
Organization (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2011).
3
See Code of Federal Regulations 1604.11–Sexual harassment.

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 CHAPTER 10

TACIT KNOWLEDGE SHARING

AND NEGOTIATIONS

IMPOSTER SYNDROME AND PEER NETWORKS

Facing a myriad of challengers and biases, tacit knowledge sharing became a

key strategy for the Chinese-born women scientists and engineers to overcome
difficulties and advance careers. This chapter explores the main categories of tacit
knowledge that the Chinese women community shares on a regular basis.
Like many female scientists and engineers, the Chinese women I studied
suffered severely from “imposter syndrome,” which is a psychological term for the
phenomenon when individuals have trouble internalizing or acknowledging their
accomplishments. While this kind of behavior has been described in a report from
NASA’s conference on Women in Astronomy and Space Science in 2009, there
has been little follow-up research on this proposed syndrome. While it is entirely
possible that male doctoral students also suffer from symptoms caused by low self-
esteem, the findings from the current study show that forming peer networks is a
primary coping strategy for many Chinese women.1
In this study, all of the women doctoral students had excelled in a competitive pool
of graduate school candidates, entered prestigious doctoral programs, published at
least three journal articles during their doctoral studies, and were working diligently
towards their academic professional goals. However, their fear of “not being good
enough” or being considered “unqualified and stupid” constantly made them
abstain from many interactions with professors and intellectual exchanges at major
conferences. Instead, these students turned to postdoctoral and junior researchers
rather than their advisers and colleagues for effective feedback and scholarly
assistance. As one woman explained:
I do believe that it’s important to talk to different people in your department. I
feel sometimes the senior people in your group can be even more helpful than
your adviser … They are in the same group and they’ve been through all this
[doctoral program] and they know what it is like to finish a project and what
it is like to finish doctoral education in your field. So sometimes they can give
you more specific suggestions that can be more helpful to your research.
This participant elaborated on her strategy of dealing with her constant feelings
of “fear” and being “lost,” which involved interacting with senior peers in her
research group. These “senior peers” could be more advanced doctoral students,
postdoctoral researchers, or staff researchers. Some women turned to their

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postdoctoral peers for guidance in the areas in which their advisers were not
specialists. For example, a physical scientist discussed the reasons why she turned
to postdocs for certain types of feedback:
My adviser is a good scientist and she has great ideas but she’s not a great
programmer. She doesn’t do all those technical stuff. So if I had a question like
that, I would go to a programmer or I would go to a junior research staff or
postdoc. They would tell me what to do. It’s usually turn to postdocs for this
kind of things [practical and coding related questions]. More technical stuff.
This student’s research project did not necessarily align with her adviser’s
research interests. She reported her constant “struggle” of not being able to find the
right direction or effective feedback. Eventually, she formed an “advisory panel”
with several junior staff researchers, and made connections with several postdoctoral
researchers who provided her with suggestions that helped further her research.
The network of junior staff women researchers’ assistance goes beyond these
women’s research. As advanced women doctoral candidates started to look for
jobs or postdoctoral positions – a large majority of them applied for at least five
positions at the same time – many women reported that postdoctoral and/or staff
researchers provided them with extremely helpful and informative insights on not
only their applications, but also other potential career aspects such as learning about
living conditions, family friendly policies, work-life balance, and office/research
lab politics. These postdoctoral and staff researchers came from different parts of
the country or world, most likely had worked with prominent professors in national
labs or on research teams, and had done multiple postdoctoral appointments. Their
insights into the significant details of potential positions proved crucial to the women
doctoral students throughout the employment search process.
In some cases, graduate students were introduced to their potential employers
through networks of these senior peers. Many women doctoral students often met
the researchers and professors who may potentially employ them via introductions
from postdoctoral fellows and/or staff researchers. A civil engineering student shared
a story of how one woman in her PhD program found her first job after finishing
graduate school:
Being connected with staff researchers is awesome because he probably knows
a lot more people in the industry, and I know one girl in our lab was having
trouble getting a job. So she went and asked him and he gave her applications
to this company, and she got hired a week later. So he’s the kind of the guy who
knows people, and that’s really convenient.
This participant shared that she has been trying to form close relationships with
senior peers in hopes that she will be able to find a job upon graduation through their
network of engineers.
During the first two years of the doctoral program, women students formed
their support group and community based on gender and field of study. Yet, as

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their academic careers progressed, these doctoral women’s networks expanded to

include both female and male senior peers, such as postdoctoral researchers and staff
researchers.
The group dynamics also increased in diversification across disciplines, as
interaction expanded to the scientific communities that bordered their respective
fields. For example, chemical engineers may have collaborated with biologists
and biochemists. Funding resources could expand proportionally due to the
interdisciplinary collaborations. Some of the interviewed chemical engineering
students reported that they ran out of funding on their main research project. They
then began to work on an interdisciplinary project in a biomedical research center
and were able to secure further funding through a different grant from the National
Institutes of Health (NIH).
One of the women was a fourth-year doctoral candidate who used the words
“mentor” and “adviser” interchangeably in interviews. Her adviser was a well-
connected, prestigious principal investigator of many large-scale NASA projects.
Ironically, this woman student noted that she received “very little” or even “no
support” from her adviser. While discussing the definition of “mentoring,” she sighed
and said, “I wish my adviser was more hands-on. I feel that I didn’t learn much from
her. Graduate school has taught me that sometimes peers can provide more help
than advisers,” using the word “peers” to refer to the postdoctoral researchers in her
group. This Chinese woman scientist added, “Many of them are in the same office
with me and they’ve helped me so much to improve my research skills. I probably
would have dropped out by now if they weren’t there.”
She was not alone when it came to relying on senior peers for advice and
feedback, even in the process of seeking employment. An astronomy student shared
the following:
I’ve been applying for many jobs and fellowships in the last six months and
my officemates have been doing the same, but they are postdocs. I ask them
questions on applications. They went through and read my stuff. Their opinions
on things, such as salary and living conditions, are very helpful. I wouldn’t
really ask my adviser about that kind of stuff. I think I would ask him about the
science and the people who work there to see if that’s a good place to go. But
for the outside, for the work-life balance, I would turn to the postdocs.
Peer networks turn out to be one of the most effective strategies for many Chinese
women, not only in overcoming their imposter syndrome but also in learning to
negotiate in their professional lives.

SWITCHING ADVISERS

Not everyone found the perfect adviser to work with in graduate school, and when
the relationship did not work, a vast majority of the women interviewed found
themselves having to negotiate the task of switching advisers, and seemingly more

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often than their male counterparts. Many of the women discussed difficulties caused
by dysfunctional advising relationships and that they had trouble bringing up their
intention to change advisers to one whose research interests and personality might
be better matched.
One Chinese woman faculty member, who once held an administrative position in
her department, elaborated on this issue in greater detail, discussing the nature and
implications of such a phenomenon in physical sciences and engineering:
I talk to them [women doctoral students] when they’re visiting about this issue,
that not every student can work with every adviser and not every adviser can
work with every student because everybody’s styles are different. So more
important than the topic is you’ve got to find the right topic, but if that advising
relationship doesn’t work or doesn’t function well, you don’t have fun and
you won’t be motivated and it’s not going to work. Students shouldn’t feel
obliged to continue; there’s no offense [changing advisers]. There’s absolutely
no offense, and especially if [the relationship] is short.
Regardless of the suggestions given by this professor, a reality discussed by the
majority of the women in this study is that they had few places that they could
turn to for assistance in dealing with their dysfunctional advising relationships.
Some of them chose to stay silent, but others found ways to negotiate with their
advisers and departments. A Chinese woman engineer who had just started working
in the industry shared, “There is a saying in Chinese, xiao bu ren ze luan da mou
(小不忍则乱大谋), which translates as a ‘little impatience spoils big plans’.” This
was not the only time I heard such a comment. Some Chinese women scientists
would give each other suggestions such as this to tell them to put up with their
advisers regardless of the dysfunctional relationship. They thought putting up with
this situation could somehow help them in the long run. When I probed this further,
a Chinese postdoc shared, “I don’t think it’s a good strategy either but I think many
of us believe that it’s not good to burn bridges. Switching advisers would be one of
those things that could burn bridges.”
Funding issues and research interests forced one woman scientist to stay with
her adviser despite his “hostile and abrasive” behavior over the past few years. She
shared:
My adviser does have very sexist tendencies, which has been very challenging
to work with. He’s just abrasive and rude and that type of thing. I did think
about it [switching advisers], but there’s really no one else in the department
who does what I do, and the other person who I was interested in didn’t have
any money.
She had been coping with a dysfunctional protégé-mentor relationship for almost
four years. But she has finally learned to approach other faculty in the department
with various research and personal questions.

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While this woman scientist was not the only person who shared this kind of
experience, other research participants elaborated additional reasons that stopped
them from changing advisers. These factors were mainly due to their fear of being
perceived as “not being loyal” to their current adviser or of “wasting their two or
three years of doctoral studies” in order to start over with a new adviser.
A Chinese woman from the physical sciences regarded switching advisers to
be “the best decision she’s ever made in her entire graduate school career.” She
reflected on working with her former adviser as “the darkest period of time in her
graduate school memory.” She reflected:
A few other people [started] working with him but lasted maybe three months
because he’s rather rude and abrasive; he is not a very sympathetic person. So
if you have a problem, he’s going to scream at you. Either you fight back and
that pisses him off, or you just sit back and take it. Oh my God, it was terrible.
With the support of other Chinese women in the science community at her
institution, this student eventually accumulated enough courage and decided that
she would refuse to put up with her adviser’s behavior any longer. Although she had
to start over on her dissertation project, she turned out to be much more efficient and
productive, and less frightened.
However, many Chinese doctoral students in this study believed the myth that
“if you change to a different adviser, it will take you longer to graduate.” And to
a certain extent, they were correct; they often did have to start over may have lost
valuable time. But another Chinese woman, who was getting close to graduating
from her program, challenged such hegemonic beliefs and argued that changing to a
different adviser whose research interests and personality were easier to work with
can in fact benefit your research skills and career outlook:
The first [adviser], I didn’t get along with personally and I just couldn’t
work with. I also wasn’t interested in the research. And so after the first year,
I switched to my second adviser, who I liked a good deal and who’s very
supportive, who’s also very willing to talk about which conferences I should
go to. He was very supportive of my research and was also very supportive for
the teaching. But I didn’t actually work with that person. I worked with two
other people. They had the extra funding and their research is more appealing
to me. One is also very supportive and very nice and the third was not very
supportive and I had a very hard time with. And then the funding ran out in that
project and I ended up switching to my other adviser, who’s currently more
formal than the other two were.
She then asserted that many Chinese women doctoral students were unaware that
it was not mandatory to stay with the same adviser throughout their program. Based
on this first-hand experience, to maximize the research, funding, and networking
resources, constantly searching for the best adviser to work with turns out to be an

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effective approach. It is this kind of constant negotiation and collaboration that helps
Chinese women doctoral students get through their graduate programs successfully
and eventually land their ideal research or teaching positions.
Unfortunately, during my fieldwork with the community of Chinese women
scientists and engineers, this kind of proactive negotiation was rarely seen. Many
of them are still putting up with horrible working and studying conditions, to this
very day. Lack of institutional resources, self-esteem, and systematic support have
put these Chinese women at an extreme disadvantage when it comes to protecting
their own rights.
In addition, the Chinese media portrays American society as a capitalist machine
that is filled with greed and violence, as evidenced by the housing market bubble and
frequent school and public shootings. This has largely influenced the ways Chinese
women conducted their daily research and life. They did not want to complain or
stand out too much, and just wanted to stay safe and low-key in order to finish their
graduate studies and secure jobs.

HARMONY AND CONFLICT

This study unveiled many dysfunctional adviser-advisee relationships among

Chinese women students and their male doctoral advisers. Many of these conflicts
stemmed from Chinese women’s frustration over their advisers’ attitudes towards
Chinese women in group meetings and personal coaching sessions.
Several women doctoral students described how they were constantly “put on
the spot” at their group research meetings and asked to explain the poor health care
system and lack of human rights and academic freedom in China. One graduating
woman student described, “I am a biomedical engineer. I still remember when the
Chinese baby formula scandals occurred, I was put on the hot seat at a group meeting
to explain this whole phenomenon. I felt like I was forced into defending China and
explaining to the world why it is so backwards.”2
This Chinese woman’s experience was not unique. Nearly all of the Chinese
women I studied shared similar situations. Yet for a variety of reasons they were
not able or willing to openly face these conflicts. Hardly any of the Chinese women
I interviewed stood up for themselves. They cited reasons such as we “do not want
to burn bridges,” “do not want to further embarrass themselves,” or “want to have
harmony with other colleagues and professors.”
This phenomenon verifies the theory identified by many conflict management
studies of Chinese communities: the concept of harmony serves as a key motivator
and strategic context for coping with conflict. Due to the influence of the broader
collectivist culture, the majority of Chinese people do not like to confront conflict
due to concerns about “losing face,” thus losing mutual respect, trust, and beneficial
behaviors.3

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 TACIT KNOWLEDGE SHARING AND NEGOTIATIONS

New waves of studies show that this characteristic of Chinese culture, if managed
appropriately, could yield to making productive use of their conflicts and turn conflicts
into productive conversations, opportunities to build mutual respect and long-term
relationships.4 Moving forward, these transnational cultural and management lessons
could be adopted and studied among Chinese science and engineering communities
in the U.S., as very little literature has focused on this critical topic.

NOTES
1
See National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Women in Astronomy and Space
Science 2009: Meeting the Challenges of an Increasingly Diverse Workforce, proceedings from a
NASA conference, Oct 21–23, 2009, College Park, MD (Washington, DC: Goddard Space Flight
Center, 2009), http://wia2009.gsfc.nasa.gov/WIA2009_proceedings.pdf (accessed August 20, 2015).
2
The Chinese milk scandal refers a serious food safety problem that happened in 2008. It involved
baby formula contaminated with melamine that affected over 300,000 victims in total. Approximately
54,000 babies were hospitalized and six infants died from kidney damage.
3
Guoquan Chen, Chunhong Liu, and Dean Tjosvold, “Conflict Management for Effective Top
Management Teams and Innovation in China,” Journal of Management Studies 42, no. 2 (2005):
277–300; Kwok Leung, Pamela Tremain Koch, and Lin Lu, “A Dualistic Model of Harmony and
Its Implications for Conflict Management in Asia,” Asia Pacific Journal of Management 19, no. 2–3
(2002): 201–220.
4
Dean Tjosvold and Haifa F. Sun, “Social Face in Conflict: Effects of Affronts to Person and Position
in China,” Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice 4, no. 3 (2000): 259–271; Dean Tjosvold
and Haifa F. Sun, “Effects of Influence Tactics and Social Contexts in Conflict: An Experiment on
Relationships in China,” International Journal of Conflict Management 12, no. 3 (2001): 239–258.

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 CHAPTER 11

SEA TURTLES RETURN TO CHINA

Previous studies of Chinese students in the U.S. have identified three factors that
have affected the post-Tiananmen period return migration: career potential, political
reasons, and family ties.1 On a personal level, in the current study, many Chinese
women doctoral students began to rethink and reexamine their identities as they
approached graduation. That is when their relationships with parents and potential
spouses began to change. They were not only transitioning from their academic
studies into the job market but also making a shift in their re-prioritization of familial
and relationship status.2
In a two-decade old study, Zweig and Chen found that Chinese women were
more likely to stay in the U.S. upon graduating from graduate programs compared to
their male counterparts.3 Much speculation was made regarding the reason for this
trend. Some scholars argue that this gender-specific migration trend could be due to
a better pool of marriage prospects, less gender bias at workplaces, and fewer filial
responsibilities compared to living in a Confucian society.4 In the current study, I
found that the group of Chinese women scientists and engineers did not treat these
potential factors as priorities when it comes to their career decisions.
None of the Chinese women scientists and engineers I interviewed expressed any
interest in returning to China. The one exception came from a computer scientist who
has been working in the U.S. for the past 25 years. She mentioned that as soon as
both of her children graduate from college, she would consider a managerial position
for an international corporation in China. She often spoke about her love for Chinese
food and her regret of falling out of touch with many of her family members. Yet
she said moving to China before her children are grown was “unimaginable.” Many
women scientists cited their concern over social stigma on highly educated women,
the extremely competitive K-12 education system, and male dominance in Chinese
science and engineering fields as the top reasons for staying in the U.S.
One associate scientist who started working three years ago summarized this
common view: “We all hear that there are gender inequalities in the U.S. but it’s
way better than China! Our female friends who returned either had a lot of trouble
establishing in the field or cannot find a boyfriend given that Chinese men don’t
want their wives to outsmart them.” Another woman chimed in, “It is very hard
for women of my age [28–32] to find jobs in China. Universities don’t like to hire
women who have no children. They are making the assumption that we will have
children and stop treating our work and science seriously.”
As Altbach pointed out, the global knowledge system is fundamentally unequal.
A few countries such as the U.S., some European countries, and Australia are the

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scientific knowledge powerhouses that attract science and engineering talents from
developing countries and use them to consolidate their already powerful knowledge
base.5 Some scholars argue that this is why so many of most talented Chinese
scientists and engineers choose to remain in the U.S.6
China is well aware of this brain drain effect, as between 1978 and 2006 less
than 20 percent of its students overseas returned to China, and men were more
likely to return than women. While the exact gender breakdown among overseas
educated Chinese returning to China is unknown, in a large scale quantitative study,
Zeithammer and Kellogg confirmed previous scholars’ findings that “overall, women
are less willing to sacrifice income to return to China.”7
Doctoral students from China and India have a higher than average stay rate in the
U.S. The stay rate for Chinese doctorate recipients was around 92 percent.8 Although
this figure dropped to 83 percent five years after graduation, that is still substantial,
and thus Chinese scientists’ and engineers’ contributions in the U.S. should not
be underestimated. The 10 percent drop in the stay rate among Chinese scientists
and engineers has been largely due to the Chinese government’s aggressive talent
recruiting initiatives.
The number of Chinese students gaining degrees abroad has soared during the
past two decades. While there were only 39,613 Chinese students studying in the
U.S. in 1995, the number had reached 274,676 by 2014.9 Many have chosen to stay
in the U.S., but the return rate has been increasing during recent years. The Chinese
Ministry of Education claims that over 108,000 overseas students returned to China
in 2008 alone.10 These Chinese scientists and engineers and their transnational
networks built throughout the process are expected to serve as key resources and
instruments to move China forward into the next phases of technological and
economic development.
Regardless of the recent increase in the stay rate, the high stay rate of Chinese
scientists and engineers has prompted many scholars to study the factors that have
affected Chinese scientists’ decisions in terms of staying or leaving the U.S. In
addition to the personal and political issues identified by many scholars of science
studies, Geddie stated:
Recognizing students as emplaced and embedded in the complex requirements
of transnational family life, and the various forms of care and responsibility that
these stretched ties entail, enables us to develop a more nuanced understanding
of students’ perceived structures of opportunity and the construction of their
strategic intents and decisions regarding future ability/residency and work.11
The group of Chinese women scientists and engineers I studied did not seem to
have too many career options to consider. As one woman put it, “In order to talk
about career strategies, we first need to get some information about career options
or ways to get there but we are exposed to none through our doctoral education.”
This statement did not stand alone. It represents most of these women scientists’
and engineers’ situations. They received nearly all of their career information and

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advice from more senior Chinese colleagues. Career planning and preparation were
hardly discussed with their doctoral advisers or other American mentors (assuming
they have any). China’s political environment did not seem to play a key role in
their career decision process. Rather, the top two factors that influenced decisions to
move or stay in the U.S. were personal and financial.

DUAL CAREER COUPLES

The vast majority of these Chinese women’s partners were also scientists/engineers,
and many of them were also pursuing doctoral degrees in the same institutions. When
it comes to career choices, dual career couples face negotiations over whose career
is more important. Dual career hiring practices are rather common in U.S. academic
science and engineering departments, and are spoken rather highly of by the Chinese
women scientists and engineers I studied. However, a new kind of gender dynamic
is created by funding sources.
One woman who was about to return to China with her husband, who had accepted
an offer at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, shared, “They also offered me a
position but it is a researcher position with the grant that my husband secured.” She
then told me that she felt like a “new age housewife” where her financial situation
and her job are dependent on her husband’s success and research funding security.
Another factor that stops many Chinese women returning to China is related
to salary incentives. It is not generally acceptable to discuss income in Chinese
culture so the income comparison data is very difficult to collect. However, a more
senior woman scientist in the group shared a spreadsheet that included 43 Chinese
women scientists’ income information from the past five years. These scientists (not
the same group I studied) all graduated from doctoral programs in the U.S., and
were connected through informal social ties. They were working in a wide range
of positions including academia, government laboratories, and the private sector in
both the U.S. and China. The spreadsheet clearly indicated that those who stayed in
the U.S. made on average of three times as much as their counterparts who decided
to return to China.
The scientist who created this document pointed out to me that among the six
women who returned to China, their primary reasons were either to unite with their
spouses or to take care of their aging parents. Several couples talked about their
concern over the stringent and highly competitive Chinese K-12 education system.
One of them said, “We had to go through that standardized test-oriented and cut-
throat educational environment to get to where we are and the last thing I want to do
is to send my kids back in the same terrible environment!”
This woman scientist’s concern was widely discussed among many married
women scientists and engineers in this study. Even many years into their careers
in the U.S., male Chinese scientists and engineers were more likely than Chinese
women to take a managerial-level job offer in China and leave their wives and
children in the U.S. They commuted between the U.S. and China on a monthly basis.

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Thus there were a fairly large number of male scientists who were pursuing such
transnational career and lifestyles.

CHINESE GOVERNMENT-INITIATED PROJECTS TO ATTRACT AMERICAN-

EDUCATED CHINESE SCIENTISTS AND ENGINEERS

Chinese students did not commonly start studying abroad until the early 1980s. This
is largely attributable to the discontinuity in the Chinese higher education system
caused by the disruptive nature of the Cultural Revolution. China slowly entered
scientific and educational development upon the institution of the Open Door Policy
under the Deng Xiaoping leadership.12
Between 1980 and 2000, China’s rapid economic growth brought about
tremendous entrepreneurial and career growth possibilities. As a result many young
Chinese-born scientists and engineers began to return to China. Many of them
had just completed their doctoral education in the U.S., although there have been
an increasing number of returnees consisting of more experienced scientists and
engineers who have spent many years in the U.S. This trend has accelerated since the
economic collapse in 2008. This section delineates the experiences of this cohort of
‘Chinese new scientific elites’ in China and the Chinese government’s new policies
to attract overseas-educated Chinese science and engineering talents.
The Chinese science and engineering students who have had the opportunity to
study in the U.S. have largely remained in the U.S. Table 2 shows the five-year
stay rates for foreign students in the U.S. between 2001 and 2011. In response, the

Table 2. Five-year stay rates for foreign students on temporary visas receiving
Science and Engineering Doctorates, for selected countries, 2001–2011, in percentages

Country/Region 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009 2011

China 98 93 95 94 89 85
India 89 90 89 83 79 82
Europe 53 63 67 67 60 62
Canada 66 63 60 56 53 55
South Korea 22 36 44 42 42 42
Japan 24 39 41 33 40 38
Taiwan 41 48 52 43 37 38
Mexico 31 22 32 33 35 39
Brazil 26 26 31 32 33 37
All countries 58 64 67 63 62 66

Source: Michael G. Finn, Stay Rates of Foreign Doctorate Recipients from U.S. Universities, 2011. 13

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 SEA TURTLES RETURN TO CHINA

Chinese government has embarked on a series of initiatives to encourage overseas-

educated Chinese, especially in the science and engineering fields, to return to China.
They are using high salaries, generous relocation packages, the offer of managerial
positions, and infrastructural support as incentives.
As discussed earlier, many Chinese talents who have decided to take advantage
of the benefits provided by the Chinese government and return to China upon
completion of their advanced studies in the U.S. are being referred to by the public as
“haigui,” the pun which sounds like the Chinese word “sea turtles” and also means
“returnees from the sea.” Many Chinese scholars like use the concept of sea turtles
to describe this group of Chinese scientists due to a nature of sea turtles and the
trajectories of their lives. They are born on the land and then go into the ocean when
they grow up. However, they will return to the land when they are ready to have
baby turtles and start their families on the land. This metaphor is powerful due to the
emotional and patriotic values attached. Combined with another powerful Chinese
idiom “luo ye gui gen (落叶归根), or fallen leaves return to roots, these are the key
metaphors used often by the Chinese officials in promotional and marketing efforts
to persuade Chinese scientists and engineers to return to the homeland.
The promotion of Chinese nationalism also plays a key strategic role in this plan.
For instance, the Chinese government launched the “one-thousand-talents scheme” in
2009, which aimed to recruit people by offering full professorships or the equivalent
in the private sector. In addition to a generous relocation financial package of 1
million RMB (146,000 U.S. dollars) and extremely competitive research funding
and salaries, the recruitment emphasizes the importance of the “patriotic spirit to
promote and reform Chinese scientific infrastructure.” This strategy is evident
through this initiative’s promotional materials, as evidenced by the image from its
website in Figure 8.

Figure 8. Translation: “Motherland Needs You,

Motherland Welcomes You, Motherland Has Faith in You!”
Source: Chinese government’s official website for the Thousand Talents scheme.

China’s approaches to attracting top overseas Chinese scientists and engineers

have been diverse and comprehensive. Combined with the previous governmental
initiatives, such as the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Hundred Talents scheme
and the Ministry of Education’s Yangtze River Scholars scheme, China is targeting
to recruit over 10,000 highly qualified scientists and engineers ranging from the
postdoctoral level to the full professor level as well as industry experts to work and
live in China.

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This determination and policy trend has been incorporated into three national long-
term development plans: the National Plan for Medium- and Long-Term Scientific
and Technological Development (2006–2020); the National Plan for Medium- and
Long-Term Human Resources Development (2010–2020); and the National Plan for
Medium- and Long-Term Education Reform and Development (2010–2020).14
The government-organized incentive programs began during the early 1990s
triggered by Deng Xiaoping’s tour of southern China that aimed at reinforcing the
economic reform started in late 1970s. The beginning of the wave of government
programs provided incentives such as allowing returnees to settle in any city they
wanted in China. The reason why this was a big incentive was due to the Chinese
hukou (户口) residential permit system, which makes it very difficult for people to
officially settle down in big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. Having hukou in
a big city also means access to better social benefits, including for one’s children.
Early benefits also include faster and easier process to renew returnees’ passport so
they can travel abroad easily.16
Le Bail and Shen described the returnees to China:
The haigui’s average age is 26 years old when leaving China and 32 when
returning. They studied for five years and worked for three years abroad on
average. In China they mainly work in consulting and other services, in the
cultural sector or in the media. Many work for foreign or foreign founded
companies or in industrial parks dedicated to returnee entrepreneurs. The
average income is between 60,000 to 120,000 yuan.15
Towards the end of the 1990s, the Chinese government initiated a reform of
universities and encouraged them to take a more active role in recruiting overseas
Chinese scientists and engineers. The most prestigious Chinese universities, such as
Tsinghua University and Peking University, were allocated additional and significant
amounts of funds, to be used in recruiting “new talents,” preferably from overseas.
Table 3 shows a list of the diverse government initiatives established during the
1990s and 2000s that aim at attracting Chinese talent from overseas.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THESE INITIATIVES

The gender distribution among these top “talents” returning to China to take
advantage of these initiatives is extremely off-balance. The official statistics on
the demographics and specifically the gender ratio among the awardees of the one-
thousand-talents initiative remain unknown, yet my preliminary observations of
the ever-growing number of awardees on the roster posted on the initiative’s main
website indicates that women consist of less than 5 percent of the total number
of scientists who have returned to China. When I checked the awardees’ pictures
on the Hundred Talents Program initiative administered by the Chinese Academy
of Science, I saw only male scientists there. This is not surprising given that only
one quarter of the scientists and engineers are women in China (as claimed by

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Table 3. Chinese government initiatives to recruit overseas scientists and engineers

Initiative name English translation Goal Administered by Created in

留学回国人员 The Scientific To serve as a steady Chinese Ministry 1990
科研启动基金 Research Fund and reliable source to of Education
for The Returned provide funding for
Overseas Chinese returnees
跨世界优秀人 Trans-Century To offer financial Chinese Ministry 1993
才培养计划 Professional support to young of Education
Development professors returning
Program for from overseas
Outstanding Talents
春晖计划 Chuihui Program To engage Chinese Chinese Ministry 1997
scientists and of Education
engineers who have
received doctorates
overseas in short-
term projects
长江学者奖励 Chang Jiang To attract overseas Ministry of 1998
计划 Scholars Program Chinese researchers Education;
to take on visiting Li Ka Shing
professor positions in Foundation
Chinese universities
海外留学学者 Academic To finance Ministry 2008
回国工作服务 Short-Term outstanding Chinese of Human
计划 Return Program scholars studying or Resource;
for Overseas doing research abroad Large research
Scholars to give lectures or universities
carry out research
in 28 key Chinese
universities during
their vacation or
sabbatical leaves
百人计划 Hundred Talents To recruit outstanding Chinese 1994
Program young Science and Academy of
Technology talents Science
(with doctoral
degrees) to conduct
research in China.
Incentives include
generous salary and
research laboratory
set-up funds,
educational benefits
for children, etc.
(Continued)

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Table 3. (Continued)

Initiative name English translation Goal Administered by Created in

千人计划 Thousand Talents To attract about Chinese 2009

Program 1,000 high-level Academy of
foreign-educated Sciences; Top
skilled Chinese or ranked Chinese
foreigners in the next universities
5–10 years to develop
innovative, scientific
projects in China

Source: H
 elene Le Bail and Wei Shen, “The Return of the ‘Brains’ to China: What Are the Social,
Economic, and Political Impacts?” 17

the ministry of education statistics) and that only 5 percent of the scientists at the
Chinese National Academy of Sciences are women.
When I analyzed the key initiatives’ goals, requirements, and incentives in
both English commentaries and Chinese documentations, three prevalent patterns
stood out:

Age Restrictions and No Incentives to Specifically Attract Women Returnees

Nearly all of the Chinese government-created programs have age limits of 50 or

55. Some specific programs targeting science and engineering young talent require
candidates to be under 40 years old. And, up to present date, there have not been
any programs designed to specifically encourage Chinese women scientists’
and engineers’ participation in the program. The gender data on the returnees
was unavailable in either Chinese or English. I was able to review some Chinese
websites of selected awardees and found that over 90 percent of returnees through
these government funded programs were male.18

Hukou and Educational Incentives

Since the establishment of the PRC, China has adopted the strict resident permit
system called hukou which limits average Chinese citizens’ mobility and access to
better educational, health care, and social welfare benefits found in cosmopolitan
cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. In other words, if not born into
parents who hold residency in one of the big cities, the chances for a Chinese citizen
to obtain a Beijing or Shanghai hukou are very slim.
The Chinese government has offered any overseas Chinese returnees the freedom
to choose any top-tier city where they are willing to settle down and will provide
them hukou for that particular city. Culturally, this incentive means more than

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monetary incentives in many returnees’ minds, given that a Beijing or Shanghai

hukou means much better access to educational, medical, and cultural resources,
both for themselves and for their children.

Science and Engineering Projects Focused on Top-Ranked Universities

Nearly all of the programs have clear descriptions and specific goals aimed at
attracting ke xue ji shu ren cai (科学技术人才), or science and technology
talents. The returnees are usually assigned to work at a top-ranked university or
one of the research institutes as part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences system.
This tendency has resulted in the reality that most of these overseas returnees
are concentrated in one of the several cosmopolitan areas in China, and further
perpetuates the knowledge and scholarship inequality between urban and rural
educational systems in China.

CHALLENGES FACED BY HAIGUI

Regardless of all the social, monetary, and residential benefits that highly educated
Chinese returnees are able to enjoy, this group of PhDs faces a myriad of challenges
upon their return to China. These challenges fall under the categories of being
evaluated by higher standards, lack of local knowledge and support, gender bias,
lack of trust and access to top leadership opportunities, and unwanted jealousy and
even threats from peers who received their doctorates from Chinese universities.
First, the overseas returnees are expected to have three times the publication
productivity as their Chinese-educated peers. The expectation is that they are to
publish in only top-tier international journals; nothing less is acceptable. They are
also expected to take on all kinds of university services that are geared towards
globalization or internationalization of science and engineering disciplines. Several
women described their male classmates’ experiences after returning to China as
assistant professors:
They are evaluated based on very strict science citation criteria. They need
to do a lot of extra work for the university as they are the “golden child”
who returned from overseas. Yet, these services don’t count towards their
promotion. Many of them got so stressed out over the service but they want to
keep their mianzi19 by just taking on everything that they are given. It’s really
not a good situation.
In addition to the stress that the returnees have to deal with, the returnees usually
lack understanding and knowledge of local politics. They are considered by their
peer colleagues as the “snobs who think they have seen it all.” Thus, they may lack
colleagues’ and immediate supervisors’ support. They may have better connections
to international networks in their fields, but lack local professional support and
contacts in the Chinese science and engineering communities.

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It is important to point out that there is no tenure system in China. Although

promotional evaluations are similar, all professors are rehired upon their
successfully passing their evaluation every year. This evaluation is based on their
publication record, their service record, and peer review outcomes by colleagues
in the department. The structure in each academic department is very hierarchical:
zheng jiaoshou (正教授) or full professors, fu jiaoshou (副教授) or associate
professors, jiangshi (讲师) or equivalent of assistant professors, and zhu jiao
(助教) or the position that is one level below assistant professor but one level
above postdoc. No one is independent from others in terms of research projects,
teaching, and service responsibilities.
This is a very frustrating structure for many returnees from the U.S. due to the
fact they have become used to the tenure promotion system and are frustrated
over the extremely hierarchical structures in their departments. In this regard,
however, it should be noted that American universities themselves have been
significantly reducing the number of tenured positions and replacing them with
adjunct faculty, lecturers, and others with only temporary, year-to-year contract-
based positions.
Despite the commitment of top Chinese leadership to recruit and utilize the
talents of overseas Chinese, many scholars have found that China’s political system
is neither open nor bold enough to let returnees into their club. Li’s 2011 study of
the educational background of China’s most prominent political leadership groups
revealed:20
Returnee leaders account for 4.5% of the full members and 8.2% of the
alternates on the 16th Central Committee of the CCP, as well as 13.6% of
ministerial leaders, and 5.8% of provincial leaders. Despite all the rhetoric by
top Chinese leaders regarding the need to recruit and promote returnees to the
political establishment, the overall presence of returnees among high-ranking
leaders remains very small.21
Table 4 shows the small representation of overseas-educated Chinese in top
Chinese leadership posts. When I discussed the Chinese government initiatives with
the group of women scientists and engineers, very few of them seemed interested. I
was surprised by this reaction, as many of them were very accomplished scientists
and engineers. They told me that through their network of Chinese scientists
they had learned the downside of these initiatives and decided to jing er yuan zhi
(敬而远之), or show respect but keep distance. Their many concerns, besides
those over sexism and age restrictions mentioned earlier, were centered around
the potential hostile environment created by Chinese-educated professors (due to
differential promotional and housing policies), geographic imbalance, over-reliance
on the publication index for promotion, and the lack of connections in the Chinese
science and engineering “elite community” to be promoted to leadership positions.

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Table 4. Percentage of foreign-educated among high-ranking Chinese leaders in 2005

Leadership level Total Number of Percentage of

number*** foreign-educated foreign-educated

Full members of the 16th 198 9 4.5

Central Committee of the CCP
Alternate members of the 16th 158 13 8.2
Central Committee of the CCP
Ministerial leaders* 184 25 13.6
Provincial leaders** 397 23 5.8
*     These include ministers, vice ministers, and assistant ministers.
**     These include Party secretaries, deputy Party secretaries, governors, vice governors, and
assistant governors.
*** Biographies for all full and alternate members are available. Total numbers of ministerial
leaders (184) and provincial leaders (397) refer to those whose biographies were available, and
excludes the small number of leaders whose biographies were unavailable.

Source: L
 i, “The Status and Characteristics of Foreign Educated Returnees in the
Chinese Leadership.22

The problems of these initiatives do not stop there. Many more challenges that
have resulted from the implementation of these initiatives have caused lowered
morale among Chinese-educated scholars. The Chinese higher education system
has been reformed and revitalized during the past three decades and universities
have begun producing productive young scientists who are making significant
contributions to the scholarship and scientific dialog globally. However, the series
of initiatives launched by the Chinese government has placed primary emphasis
on the talents with overseas experience. Consequently, the yang bo shi (洋博士)
or overseas-educated doctoral degree holders and the tu bo shi (土博士) or local/
Chinese university-educated doctoral degree holders have become somewhat at odds
with each other. The tu bo shi complain about the unequal treatment they receive
from their institutions and the government compared to the overseas returnees,
whom they view as taking away the resources and promotional opportunities that
they deserve. On the other hand, the yang bo shi get frustrated over the lack of
cooperation from their Chinese educated counterparts.
The women suffer from gender discrimination from both groups. Several women
scientists I interviewed pointed out that the handful of women scientists they know
who returned to China were “suffering” from the disrespectful attitudes of both
their male yang bo shi and tu bo shi counterparts. A more senior woman scientist
described her brief working experience in China: “My university only hired men
and women who have already had babies. Their rationale is that this is good for

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scientific productivity so cannot be referred to as xingbie qishi (性别歧视), or

gender discrimination.”
Another issue regards the quality of living in Chinese metropolitan areas. As
with all of the governmental science and engineer initiatives, awardees are largely
concentrated at research centers and universities in the largest cities in China, such
as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. Many women scientists and engineers in this
study strongly preferred to stay in the U.S. rather than going to live in these large
metropolitan areas. The main reasons they gave are the pollution, the congested
traffic, the stiff educational competition among children, the unfriendly family policy,
and the institutionalized gender discrimination in hiring and promotion practices.

SHENG NÜ (剩女): LEFTOVER WOMEN

Another major challenge that overseas returnee Chinese women face is Chinese
society’s discriminatory perceptions of single women past a certain age. The comic
strip in Figure 9 depicts an emerging sociocultural phenomenon of referring to single
women past the age of 27 as sheng nü or “leftover women.”
A sociologist from Tsinghua University, Leta Hong Fincher, has explained the
meaning of this arguably most gender discriminatory Chinese phrase in the twenty-
first century in her book, Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality
in China. The term sheng, or 剩, is usually used to describe leftover and rotten
food. This word is combined with nü 女 (women) to describe highly educated and
accomplished yet single females over the age of 27. Since a notorious article named
“Do Leftover Women Really Deserve Our Sympathy” was published by the Chinese
state news agency Xinhua, this phrase has been enthusiastically welcomed and
abused by the press all over the country. The infamous Xinhua news column wrote:
Pretty girls don’t need a lot of education to marry into a rich and powerful
family. But girls with an average or ugly appearance will find it difficult.
These kinds of girls hope to further their education in order to increase their
competitiveness. The tragedy is, they don’t realize that as women age they are
worth less and less, so by the time they get their MA or PhD they are already
old, like yellowed pearls.23
A group of women engineers reviewed the column by Xinhua News agency
and showed clear disappointment about how “backwards” China can be when it
comes to gender equality at workplaces.24 They noted that this kind of stigma in
China strongly discourages women from pursuing graduate degrees, especially in
science and engineering. They cited the “unequal treatment” and severe gender
discrimination as the main reasons why they would rather stay in the U.S., even
with the likelihood of getting paid less than men and having to constantly cope with
cultural and social challenges.

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Figure 9. City leftover women. Translation: The man on the left says, “She is too educated.”
The man on the right says, “She is too talented.” The writing on the middle block reads,
“Urban leftover women looking for spouses.”25

Another factor that many Chinese women scientists discussed was the one-sided
way of evaluating scientists’ and engineers’ achievements by measuring only the
quantity of their publications. As Cao and Stuttmeier noted:
Chinese scientists are obliged to participate in international scientific publication
activities so as to claim a position in international science … [the academic

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institutions in China] have used the impact factor of journals measured by the
Science Citation Index (SCI), the citation database compiled by the Institute
for Scientific Information (ISI) in Philadelphia, as the benchmark to judge the
performance of Chinese scientists.26
The tricky part, as pointed out by a group of postdoctoral women, is that due to
their lack of social networks within the Chinese science and engineering field, it is
hard for them to find the right rapport to achieve high goals in publications. The
social networks they build during their graduate education in the U.S. can certainly
help them with publishing in international journals but it is very difficult for them to
find collaborators within their universities of employment within the first five years
upon their return.
This chapter discussed an emerging phenomenon: The increasing trend among
Chinese scientists and engineers to return to China. However, this trend seems
to be mostly prevalent among male scientists and engineers. Many of them leave
their wives and children in the U.S. to benefit from the less stressful educational
system and enjoy a higher standard of living. Additionally, major Chinese
government-sponsored projects designed to attract overseas scientists and engineers
were analyzed in this chapter. Even though many financial, research, and career
advancement incentives are offered, Chinese women scientists and engineers in this
study have been still hesitant or even resistant to the idea of returning to China.
This is largely due to institutionalized gender discrimination, academic freedom
concerns, academic dishonesty, lack of leadership opportunities, and social stigma
towards highly educated single women in China.

NOTES
1
Robert Zeithammer and Ryan P. Kellogg, “The Hesitant Hai Gui: Return-Migration Preferences of
US-Educated Chinese Scientists and Engineers,” Journal Of Marketing Research 50, no. 5 (2013):
644–663.
2
Kate Geddie, “The Transnational Ties That Bind: Relationship Considerations for Graduating
International Science and Engineering Research Students,” Population, Space and Place 19, no. 2
(2013): 196–208.
3
David Zweig, Chen Changgui, and Stanley Rosen, “Globalization and Transnational Human Capital:
Overseas and Returnee Scholars to China,” The China Quarterly 179 (September, 2004): 735–757.
4
Zeithammer and Kellogg, “The Hesitant Hai Gui.”
5
Melissa Anderson and Judith Swazey, “Reflections on the Graduate Student Experience: An
Overview,” New Directions for Higher Education 101 (1998): 3–14; Philip G. Altbach, Comparative
Higher Education: Knowledge, the University, and Development (Westport, CT: Greenwood
Publishing Group, 1998).
6
Cong Cao, “Chinese Science and the ‘Nobel Prize Complex’,” Minerva 42, no. 2 (2004): 151–172,
doi:10.1023/B:MINE.0000030020.28625.7e
7
Zeithammer and Kellogg, “The Hesitant Hai Gui,” 4.
8
Michael G. Finn, Stay Rates of Foreign Doctorate Recipients From U.S. Universities, 2011 (Oak
Ridge, TN: Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education, 2014).
9
1995–1996 was the first year of recorded data on Chinese students studying in the U.S. China sent
hardly any students to the U.S. from the 1950s until 1973/74. During the 1980s, the number of Chinese

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students in the U.S. grew dramatically. In 1988/89, China replaced Taiwan as the leading sender of
international students to the U.S. The leading position was replaced by Japan and India for a few years
but China is now back to the Number One position.
10
Chinese Ministry of Education, “Educational Statistics.”
11
Geddie, “The Transnational Ties That Bind,” 205.
12
Cong Cao and Richard P. Suttmeier, “China’s New Scientific Elite: Distinguished Young Scientists,
the Research Environment and Hopes for Chinese Science,” The China Quarterly 168 (2001):
959–984, doi:10.1017/S0009443901000560
13
Finn, Stay Rates of Foreign Doctorate Recipients From U.S. Universities, 2011.
14
Jie Hao and Anthony Welch, “A Tale of Sea Turtles: Job-Seeking Experiences of Hai Gui (High-
Skilled Returnees) in China,” Higher Education Policy 25, no. 2 (2012): 243–260, doi:10.1057/
hep.2012.4.
15
Helene Le Bail and Wei Shen, “The Return of the ‘Brains’ to China: What Are the Social, Economic,
and Political Impacts?” Asie Visions 11 (October 2008), http://www.ifri.org/sites/default/files/atoms/
files/AV11_ENG.pdf.
16
Le Bail and Shen, “The Return of the ‘Brains’ to China.”
17
Le Bail and Shen, “The Return of the ‘Brains’ to China.”
18
Given that one cannot always tell gender from Chinese names, the data I was able to collect was based
on awardees’ profile photos from the initiatives’ or their collaborative universities’ websites. While
this is not the most quantitatively reliable method for collecting data, it is the most accessible given
the unavailability of demographic data released by the Chinese government.
19
Mianzi or 面子 means “to save face,” which is used to describe the lengths that an individual may be
willing to go in order to preserve their established position in society, taking action to ensure that one
is not thought badly of by their peers.
20
Cheng Li, “The Status and Characteristics of Foreign-Educated Returnees in the Chinese Leadership,”
Chinese Leadership Monitor 16, (2005, Fall), http://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/uploads/
documents/clm16_lc.pdf. The three most prominent Chinese political leadership groups include: (1)
members and alternates of the current Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party; (2) leaders
of all 28 ministries and commissions under the State Council, including ministers, vice ministers, and
assistant ministers; and (3) provincial leaders in China’s 31 provincial-level administrations, including
provincial Party secretaries, deputy Party secretaries, governors, and vice governors.
21
Li, “Status and Characteristics,” 3.
22
Li, “Status and Characteristics.”
23
Originally appeared in Xinhua News Agency, 2011. Reposted on All-China Women’s Federation
website days after International Women’s Day the same year. Translated by Leta Hong Fincher in her
New York Times article, “China’s ‘Leftover’ Women.”
24
See Leta Hong Fincher, “China’s ‘Leftover’ Women,” New York Times, October 11, 2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/12/opinion/global/chinas-leftover-women.html?_r=0
25
Original cartoon image was posted by Renmin.com.cn, the website for the People’s Daily, the Chinese
Communist Party’s official newspaper. The article promoted the sentiment of denouncing leftover
women and blamed them as the reason for their problems. After being criticized by both the Chinese
and overseas audience, it took off the article. This image was retrieved from a non-state-run small
news outlet, http://news.iqilu.com/china/gedi/2011/1124/1056436.shtml.
26
Cao and Suttmeier, “China’s New Scientific Elite,” 968.

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 SECTION IV
GENDERED TRANSNATIONAL NETWORKS,
GUANXI, AND THE POWER OF
REVERSED MIGRATION
 CHAPTER 12

GUANXI
Cultural and Social Networks among Chinese Women

Studies of successful strategies among minority women scientists show that they
build webs of relationships to support each other. The guanxi ties are one example
of these, one based on Chinese ethnicity, but there are others, called meshworks, that
informally tie together women in different fields and women from different parts
of the world. Successful programs for supporting women scientists show that these
networks focus on integrating these women into everyday, ongoing practices.1
One crucial aspect of studying women’s career strategies in physical sciences
and engineering is to investigate how such meshworks are constructed to support
these women’s career development.2 In Escobar’s fieldwork among women engaged
in  economic activities, he developed the concept of meshworks to describe two
parallel dynamics: strategies of localization and the interweaving of different
networks. Meshworks refers to “branches” or “informal nexus” as described in
Escobar’s and Ingold’s works on science, technology, and culture.3 Murillo et al.
discovered the significance of meshworks in affecting underrepresented women
astronomers’ scientific careers in research labs and universities.4
Formal and informal social networks (meshworks) serve as key resources for
Chinese women scientists and engineers not only in their day-to-day scientific work
and activities but also in advancing their careers and establishing their credibility as
scientists in the field. Three key factors intersect with each other in forming these
transnational ties: Chinese, scientific, and gender. These factors are interwoven
into a sophisticated webs of relationships that are paving new paths for generations
of immigrant Chinese women scientists and engineers, and significantly affecting
global science and engineering migration, as well as creating new opportunities for
U.S.-educated Chinese scientists in both the U.S. and China.
Guanxi (关系) is arguably the most important sociological concept in modern day
China. It refers to the mutually beneficial relationships established between people
with similar socioeconomic or educational backgrounds. Many guanxi networks
have been established amongst Chinese-born, U.S.-educated women engineers
and scientists. The first chapter in this section will be devoted to explaining the
formation and importance of these kinds of ethnic networks in helping Chinese
women scientists overcome barriers, establish collaborations, and succeed in
U.S. science and engineering fields. Indian and women from other countries
around the world also have their own ethnic and nationality-based networks and
communities of practice.

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In focusing on Chinese women scientists’ and engineers’ experiences and

strategies of utilizing multi-faceted networks to advance science and engineering
careers, findings from this study revealed a prevalent concept: Chinese ethnic
diaspora-based knowledge networks assist Chinese women in surviving, navigating,
and in some cases succeeding in U.S. and global science and engineering careers.
These relationships exist among ethnic Chinese and constitute a network of contacts
in which one is able to prevail upon another to perform a favor or service. It also
indicates a state of understanding between two people. These ties take time to build
but become strongly emotionally bonded and cannot be easily broken.
Guanxi networks widely exist in the Chinese diasporic scientific communities.
The concept of Chinese scientific diaspora community cannot be strictly defined
by departmental or institutional boundaries, and extends both horizontally and
vertically beyond these women’s graduate careers. From the beginning of graduate
school, Chinese doctoral students, male and female, connect across research teams
and laboratories to identify and implement appropriate approaches to choosing the
right classes, selecting the right research projects, orienting themselves to their
advisers’ “styles,” and securing funding. The women I studied were less likely than
their male colleagues to discuss their strategic engagement of networks in promoting
their careers. Beyond graduate school, guanxi networks play key roles throughout
Chinese scientists’ and engineers’ careers.

THE CHINESE DIASPORA KNOWLEDGE NETWORK

The term diaspora originates from Greek. It was first used to refer to those who
settled in new lands but shared a common cultural identity.5 The term was later used
to describe Jews during the sixth century B.C.E., who were forced to leave Israel and
move into Babylonia. At that time, diaspora connoted the involuntary desire to leave
the home country along with the desire to return to it one day.6 Compared to other
kinds of migration, diaspora demonstrates a system of shared personal connection,
cultural heritage, language, and imagined connections with home countries.7
These diasporic networks are prevalent among Chinese scientists and engineers.
As a result of China’s increasingly influential role in the global science and
engineering community, its diaspora of highly educated scientists and engineers
have become essential players in the globalized scientific innovation arena. These
often U.S.-educated yet Chinese-born scientists, especially the ones who have
moved to Silicon Valley, serve as central knowledge producers and transmission
agents in transnational science and engineering spaces.
The transnational cultural and social networks of Chinese communities first began
to emerge during the 1980s when trade began dramatically increasing between Asia,
Europe, and the U.S., and has since been fostered by globalization and the growth
of the internet. In Rauch and Trindade’s study of overseas Chinese communities’
influence on international trade and businesses, they found that informal ties between
ethnic Chinese communities were effective at helping all parties to overcome all

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kinds of trade barriers and that they played a significant role in increasing both the
quality and quantity of international trading.8
Rauch and Trindade further analyzed the roles that Chinese communities played,
depending on the number of ethnic Chinese in a particular region:
Where ethnic Chinese communities are relatively large fractions of their
countries’ populations and have relatively numerous direct connections across
international borders, they facilitate international trade primarily by helping
to match international buyers and sellers in characteristics space, and ethnic
Chinese communities that are small fractions of their countries’ populations
are close-knit and facilitate international trade mainly by enforcing community
sanctions that deter opportunistic behavior.9
Based on my conversations with the women scientists and engineers I studied,
similar distinctions prevail among the Chinese scientists and engineers. Based on
the geographic location in the U.S., the region/institution where a large number of
Chinese scientists and engineers work, the roles of these scientists are primarily
matching the research, funding, and teaching needs through their strong and multi-
dimensional international ties. At places where Chinese scientists and engineers
consist of a very small proportion of the department/institution, their roles are more
important in facilitating international knowledge circulation through their close-knit
groups and the impact is more linear.
The concept of networks among scientists and engineers in the transnational space
has been defined by Sharon Traweek in her groundbreaking ethnographic study of
Japanese, European, and American high-energy physicists at transitional labs in both
Japan and the U.S. According to her:
Networks are the set of relationships that bind the particle physics community.
Through those relationships, graduate students are placed, physics experiments
are evaluated, and long-range goals are debated and determined. These
networks intersect with the formal organization of laboratories and national
physics advisory panels, shaping the day-to-day understanding and use of
those formal structures. Diverse kinds of information are exchanged in the
networks, some of it significant, some of it apparently trivial: it is the use of the
channel that keeps it open. Arranging for the placement of graduate students
and postdocs is a routine but highly significant transaction for the community.
The exchange of young physicists establishes long-term rights and obligations
between the groups involved. Conversely, the absence of any exchange is a
signal to notice.10
Similar to the social networks Traweek described, nearly three decades later the
fundamental factors that bond these networks among scientists and engineers are
still largely the same among the scientists’ and engineers’ community. In the case
of Chinese scientists and engineers, the institutional and personal ties established
by students and postdocs serve as a critical resource for future students and visiting

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scholar exchanges. Transnational research teams are formed through these formal
and informal ties and funding sources thus become rather diverse. These connections
among the Chinese scientists are more likely to be male-centered. Women’s
connections tend to be either through more senior male mentors and professors or
through their own informal and personal connections.
Approximately 15 percent of all the Chinese scientists’ networks I studied
exclusively involved women. The remainder were not exclusively women’s networks
yet women were playing important yet unrecognized roles in these communities.
The group of women scientists in this study were quite conscious about who they
were connected to. They believed that making the right connections was important
to their personal and professional development, and also thought that connecting
to the ‘wrong’ group of people could have negative consequences. Several women
scientists pointed out that they often felt pressured to join one of the male lead
Chinese scientists’ groups as their transnational connections, social capital, and
resources could get these women to where they would like to be in achieving their
career goals.
I asked a woman engineering professor about the major networks she has utilized
to advance her career. Once she started describing her connections from the first
day she started graduate school in the U.S., she was shocked by the percentage
of Chinese scientists and engineers in her professional network; 80 percent of the
connections listed by this woman professor were Chinese. She said while these kinds
of nationality-based networks have brought her many benefits in terms of applying
for funding, choosing research teams, and collaborating with Chinese scientists and
engineers transnationally, the nature of this kind of networks has also brought her
unnecessary attention. She mentioned that other professors in the department would
gossip about how she only admitted Chinese students, claiming she did so because
they reminded her of her experience when she came to the U.S. According to this
professor, Chinese students were more likely to maintain their strong professional
and personal ties beyond their graduation. She said, “Not everyone will choose to
stay in the U.S., but they actually maintain the professional network they established
while they are here for decades after graduation.”
According to the Chinese Ministry of Education’s data from 2013, China has
over 2,200 universities and colleges. However, approximately 10 universities supply
the vast majority of the U.S. science and engineering doctoral students, postdocs,
and other scholars/researchers. After triangulating the names based on the list I
collected, the 10 Chinese universities that serve as the biggest feeder institutions
for U.S. science and engineering doctoral programs were: Tsinghua University,
Zhejiang University, the University of Science and Technology of China, Fudan
University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Beihang University, the Harbin Institute
of Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Peking University,
and East China University of Science and Technology.
Nearly all of the Chinese doctoral students in top U.S. science and engineering
programs, including virtually all of the women I studied, went to one of these 10

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institutions for their undergraduate education. Many of their doctoral advisers in the
U.S. have connections with professors at the research centers of these universities.
Many assistant professors who are teaching at these Chinese institutions received
their doctorates from one of the top science and engineering programs in the U.S.,
such as MIT, University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign, Virginia Tech, Cornell,
Stanford, and the California Institute of Technology.
Alumni relations for graduates of Chinese universities used to be nearly non-
existent. But many science and engineering alumni are now closely connected
through self-organized academic conferences and informal gatherings. Social media
is also playing a big role for Chinese scientists and engineers in maintaining their
connections with mainland China. The reliance on Chinese-based social media
applications was extremely strong among Chinese women scientists and engineers,
especially during the first two years of arriving in the U.S. But they rarely used
popular U.S. applications such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, many of which
are blocked by the Chinese government. They were more likely to use wildly
popular Chinese equivalents of these, such as WeChat (微信) and Weibo (微博) to
share updates about their lives in the U.S. and communicate with colleagues about
research ideas.11
Many Chinese students and scientists in the United States use this online space
to share their observations of American culture, food, and scenery when they first
come to the U.S. This practice is called shai zhaopian (晒照片), or showing off
photos, which often carries the implication of enjoying a better, freer, and more
enjoyable lifestyle. The practice of picture and comment sharing plays a key role in
maintaining strong ties between Chinese women scientists and engineers across the
world.
The Chinese women scientists and engineers I studied rarely spoke about
intentionally curating their networks. Yet, they have also all benefited professionally
from the Chinese connections they established from the beginning of their
undergraduate years. Many women scientists who returned to China are intentionally
maintaining and expanding their ties with the U.S., but at a much slower rate
compared to their male counterparts. One of the reasons that the Chinese returnee
scientists are motivated to maintain strong ties with their U.S. colleagues is that
their promotion in Chinese universities is strongly associated with their publication
records in internationally-ranked English language journals. Their international
networks give them quite an advantage over their tu bo shi (Chinese-educated
doctoral degree holders) counterparts, but they must be maintained and cultivated.

SOCIAL CAPITAL AND GUANXI

Social capital is a prevalent driving force behind these transnational collaborations,

whether in international trade during the 1980s and 1990s or in the scientific
knowledge networks of present days. The concept of social capital has been studied
and furthered by many scholars. Pierre Bourdieu gave perhaps the most accurate

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definition of all. He defined social capital as “the sum total of the resources, actual
or virtual, that accrue to an individual (or a group) by virtue of being enmeshed
in a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual
acquaintance and recognition.”12
In the Chinese cultural context, social capital is more likely to be established
based on different groups of reciprocity and trustworthiness. These characteristics
are closer to the definition of bonding social capital coined by Robert Putnam,
which occurs when people are socializing with people who are like them, the
same age, discipline, nationality, gender or culture.13 Chinese social capital and
connections can be most precisely described by the term guanxi (关系). Although it
is often translated as “connections” or “relationships,” it is really much more than
that. Guanxi means the interpersonal relationships and connections of sentiments,
kinships, and obligations that direct all kinds of social interactions and assist
knowledge and favor exchanges in Chinese society and diasporic communities.
Guanxi networks have been found to advance members’ careers and grant them
access to wealth resources, while those individuals who have limited or no guanxi
networks are generally denied access to equal opportunities and resources.14
While guanxi networks have been in existence in Chinese culture for centuries,
their sociological meaning first began to be studied during the post-revolution era
in China when guanxi became a key tool for people to secure jobs, get opportunities
to be promoted, and gain access to higher education.15 This was largely due to the
Communist Party’s use of clientelism in organizing work, daily, and political life.
However, unlike during the 1960s and 1970s, the Chinese government no longer
controls the distribution of grains and rice to regular residents, higher education
selection is no longer based on recommendation by politically connected relatives,
and the majority of urban populations enjoy abundant access to material and
intellectual resources. Yet, despite the dramatic social, cultural, and economic
changes in China in recent years, guanxi still persist. These kinds of connections
remain strong among the Chinese scientific communities in China and overseas.
In her study of textile workers in China between the 1980s and early 2000,
Bian argued that the primary functions of guanxi lay in three areas: finding the
first job, career mobility and promotion, and gaining reemployment.16 In the
transnational scientific communities, however, while guanxi certainly serve
such functions, they are not the only and not necessarily the main ones that they
serve. In the context of Chinese science and engineering networks in the U.S.,
guanxi networks serve as a key tool to acculturate young Chinese scientists into
American social and scientific culture. Later on, these guanxi networks serve
as the bridge to help undergraduate students from China to apply for and secure
scholarship funding for U.S. graduate programs, and, even more importantly,
help them connect with professors and mentors. Many mentors play key and
ongoing roles in these transitions and the connections are usually strong and are
maintained over the years.

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These kinds of connections could quite often be observed among the women
Chinese scientists and engineers. For example, one of the women doctoral students
I interviewed mentioned that a professor from her Chinese undergraduate studies
had studied in the U.S. and had collaborated with several of his classmates during
his study in the U.S. This was approximately 20 years ago, and now one of this
professor’s graduate program classmates was currently her doctoral adviser.
These guanxi networks usually last a lifetime unless one member severely betrays
the rest of the group. However, while the traditional guanxi networks in Chinese
society consist mostly of relatives and intimate friends, the Chinese scientists and
engineers tended to rely more on fictive kinships. Compared to the Euro-American
social networks, which are characterized by weaker ties, less intimacy, and less
frequent interactions, Chinese guanxi networks display strong, personal, and
long-lasting interactions and gift exchanges.17 Euro-American social networks are
more likely to be utilized to gain information regarding job openings and business
opportunities while the strong Chinese guanxi networks not only provide access
and information for these areas but also cast influence on the final decision-making
process.18

NATIONAL IDENTITY AND GENERATIONAL DIFFERENCES

The understanding of national identity among the group of women differed based
on age. I spoke to many women scientists over the age of 40 in the group and found
that their experience of being Chinese in the U.S. has been somewhat bittersweet.
Many of them grew up in the turmoil-filled Maoist era. They experienced the culture
of denouncing authorities, including academics and their families, and many of them
were denied educational opportunities during the decade of turmoil in the late 1960s
and early 1970s.
Yet, their sense of nationalism was still embedded in their pride associated with
their zu guo or 祖国 (motherland). They did not speak ill of their homeland, at least
not in public. They were closely watching the advancements that China has made
during the past two decades and they were willing to contribute to furthering China’s
science and technology innovation at the right time.
The younger generation of Chinese women doctoral students and postdocs held
different views when it comes to Chinese nationalism. They fully acknowledged
the economic, science, and engineering gaps still existing between the U.S. and
China, yet they considered themselves to be a new generation of highly educated
and increasingly wealthy Chinese living abroad. While they were frustrated over
the bureaucracy and educational systems in China, they were hopeful that China
would transform during their lifetime to be an equal, free, and global science and
technology leader. When asked if they would like to participate in this movement,
the vast majority of them used the terms “jing shen zhi chi (精神支持),” which
means emotional support, or “yuan cheng zhi chi (远程支持),” which means

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remote or long-distance support, to describe the ways they would prefer to support
the cause to transform their homeland.
In other words, most women I interviewed preferred to stay in the U.S. in order
to explore career opportunities as the salaries, growth potential, and freedom from
social stigma made working in the U.S. far more appealing to them on a personal
level. As a newly minted PhD described:
Don’t get me wrong. I love China. It’s just there are so many things that need
to be improved and I don’t think my return will help in any way. That’s why
I decided to wait and develop my career in the U.S. You never know, maybe
my skills and knowledge in science will benefit China from a different angle
one day.

NOVEL WAYS OF FUNDING

Although many Chinese women doctoral students face many barriers when it comes
to seeking employment, some are utilizing their transnational networks to secure
funding, expand research resources, and conduct research through transnational
collaborations. For example, I was introduced to an American doctoral candidate
named Jane by a mutual friend from a physical sciences department. Jane was in the
midst of writing grant proposals for her potential postdoctoral position at a major
national laboratory. I went to her office for our first meeting. When I arrived she was
concluding a meeting with two other women. The office was small, cold, and had no
windows; there was a desk and bookshelf placed in each of the four corners of the
room with a round meeting table in the center.
She introduced me to her colleagues, Pia, a fourth-year doctoral student, and
Ping, a visiting scholar from China. Jane described my research project to both Pia
and Ping, who seemed to be very intrigued by the topic. Pia and Ping both worked
with the same professor and had begun working on a very recent NASA mission a
year earlier when Ping arrived at the university. I scheduled an interview with Ping
for a later time.
From the interview, I learned that Ping held a permanent position in a major
research lab in the Academy of Science in China and had been sent by her research
lab to collaborate with a research team at a research university on the west coast.
Pia’s adviser recently told her that due to the completion of the NASA mission,
Pia’s funding for her last two years of graduate school might be “unpredictable.”
Pia expressed her concerns to Jane and Ping over lunch one day and Ping suggested
they work together on a funding proposal for an interdisciplinary and transnational
collaboration grant provided by the Chinese government; this was the major purpose
of the meeting I interrupted.
I was very impressed by their passion and enthusiasm to pursue funding in such
a novel way. Jane informed me that “the U.S. government is cutting a lot of funding
for NASA’s missions and many doctoral students are have trouble graduating due

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to funding constrains. So [they] turn to transnational projects to collaborate with

European and Asian scientists.”
This kind of phenomenon is sometimes referred to as “border crossing”
or “boundary crossing,” a phrase coined by Traweek during her research on
transnational high energy physics laboratories in Japan, and then further
developed in her research on women and minority astronomers.19 Nationality-based
transitional networks play a key role in this arena.

NOTES
1
Luis Felipe R. Murillo, Diane Yu Gu, Reynal Guillen, Jarita Holbrook, and Sharon Traweek, “Partial
Perspectives in Astronomy: Gender, Ethnicity, Nationality, and Meshworks in Building Digital
Images of the Universe and Social Worlds,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 37, no. 1 (2012):
36–50. Arturo Escobar, “Culture Sits in Places: Reflections on Globalism and Subaltern Strategies
of Localization,” Political Geography 20, no. 2 (2001): 139–174. Also see Murillo et al., “Partial
Perspectives in Astronomy: Gender, Ethnicity, Nationality, and Meshworks in Building Digital Images
of the Universe and Social Worlds,” which examined the significance of meshworks in affecting
underrepresented women astronomers’ scientific careers in research labs and universities.
2
Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes.
3
Tim Ingold, “Bindings Against Boundaries: Entanglements of Life in an Open World,” Environment
and Planning A 40, no. 8 (2008).
4
Murillo et al., “Partial Perspectives in Astronomy: Gender, Ethnicity, Nationality, and Meshworks in
Building Digital Images of the Universe and Social Worlds.”
5
Michele Reis, “Theorizing Diaspora: Perspectives on ‘Classical’ and ‘Contemporary’ Diaspora,”
International Migration 42, no. 2 (2004): 41–60.
6
Judith T. Shuval, “Diaspora Migration: Definitional Ambiguities and a Theoretical Paradigm,”
International Migration 38, no. 5 (2000): 41–56, doi:10.1111/1468-2435.00127
7
Devesh Kapur, “Diasporas and Technology Transfer,” Journal of Human Development 2, no. 2 (2001):
265–268.
8
James E. Rauch, Vitor Trindade, and National Bureau of Economic Research, Ethnic Chinese
Networks in International Trade (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research),
http://catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/oclc/42027107.html
9
Rauch et al., “Ethnic Chinese Networks in International Trade,” 2.
10
Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes, 106.
11
WeChat (Chinese: 微信; pinyin: Weixin; literally: “micro message”) is a mobile text and voice
messaging communication service developed by Tencent in China, first released in January 2011.
It is the largest standalone messaging app by monthly active users in the world. Weibo (微博) is the
Chinese word for “microblog.” It refers to mini-blogging services in China, including social chat and
sharing sites. Weibo uses a format similar to its American counterpart Twitter, with the key difference
being that it is used almost exclusively by Chinese language speakers; this has a direct impact on
features such as hashtags on Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo, which both employ a double-hashtag
“#HashName#” method, since the lack of spacing between Chinese characters necessitates a closing
tag. Internet users can set up real-time information sharing communities individually, and upload and
update information in 140-character blocks.
12
Pierre Bourdieu, “L’illusion Biographique,” Actes de La Recherche En Sciences Sociales 62, no. 1
(1986): 69–72, 248
13
Robert Putnam, “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,” Journal of Democracy 6, no.
1 (1995): 65–78.
14
Yanjie Bian, “Chinese Social Stratification and Social Mobility,” Annual Review of Sociology 28
(2002): 91–116.

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CHAPTER 12

15
Andrew G. Walder, Communist Neo-Traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1pp18f
16
Bian, “Chinese Social Stratification and Social Mobility.”
17
Nan Lin, “Social Networks and Status Attainment,” Annual Review of Sociology 25 (1999, January):
467–487.
18
Yanjie Bian, “Bringing Strong Ties Back In: Indirect Ties, Network Bridges, and Job Searches in
China,” American Sociological Review 62 (1997): 366–385.
19
Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes; Murillo et al., “Partial Perspectives in Astronomy.”

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 CHAPTER 13

GLOBAL SCIENTIFIC MESHWORKS

AND WOMEN’S CAREERS

This chapter will describe and analyze women’s approaches to using webs of
connections in their everyday research practices, collaborations, and mentoring
activities, which are called meshworks. It will further discuss how these experiences
have shaped their community-building strategies. I argue that guanxi networks
should be more precisely described as guanxi meshworks, as many of the guanxi
describe informal and personalized ties of influence, and it is a central concept in
Chinese social relations.
Moreover, these meshworks are the foundation upon which larger transnational
networks are built. The larger transnational networks emerging around the world
are  composed of thousands of smaller nets, which also consist of smaller groups
and  communities. Some of these are more formalized, but many are casual and
ephemeral – real and powerful, but difficult to identify and grasp. The guanxi
meshworks are perfect examples of these.

MESHWORKS

In many cases, consistent with what Traweek observed with Japanese women
physicists, many Chinese women scientists were actively utilizing informal
“branches” and “loops” to advance their graduate study and careers.1 A student
in the electrical engineering department described her bond with other female
colleagues through the electrical engineering jargon of “mesh.” She explained how
a normal electric circuit works by connecting all of the branches together to create
a functional system, while “mesh” refers to “a web of branches forming a closed
path in a network so that if any one branch is omitted from the set, the remaining
branches of the set do not form a closed path.”2
As graduate school progressed, the group of women not only supported each other
in getting through coursework, exams, and laboratory selections, but also assisted
each other with teaching and research duties. By the third year, almost all research
participants mentioned their awareness regarding career trajectories. A Chinese
astronomy doctoral candidate described the “shocking discoveries” made by her
circle or quanzi (圈子) of women doctoral students:
We had a departmental new student orientation a week ago and my friends and
I went. All faculty stood up in front of the room, 15 men and 2 women and there
was one Asian male. I mean when you look at that … it’s like whoa … looking

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at that made us think why are there so few Chinese women faculty? What are
the obstacles that stop us along the way? That experience definitely prompted
some discussions between us. We think there are definitely organizational
barriers to stop Chinese women from advancing in both academia and other
career paths but we can’t pinpoint what they are. But having these chats
between my friends definitely made us think about things like that.
The senior women scientists and engineers were more likely to express their views
regarding the lack of support along their career paths in science and engineering in the
U.S. Most of them attributed their success (although they were too modest to regard
themselves as successful) to luck and informal meshworks. Many of the Chinese
women scientists and engineers reflected on their accomplishments and immediately
described the reason as they had been lucky enough to encounter bo le (伯乐), or
a good judge of talent. The younger Chinese women in science and engineering
graduate programs used their meshworks to overcome threats and barriers on a
regular basis, yet rarely discussed or considered them as intentional strategies.
While formal organization-based networks serve as important knowledge
transmission mechanisms, Chinese women’s informal networks serve as important
nodes in connecting the social and intellectual ties between U.S. and China.
The meshworks formed among Chinese women scientists and engineers could
be categorized into three categories: institution-based meshworks, common
experience-based meshworks, and local/lateral-based meshworks.

Institution-Based Meshworks

The most prevalent meshworks among Chinese women scientists and engineers in
the U.S. were institution-based. Members of these meshworks are Chinese women
scientists and engineers from all age groups; they are generally affiliated through
their Chinese undergraduate institutions or graduate programs and have been
mentored by the same group of professors.
This kind of meshwork encourages knowledge-sharing regarding academic needs,
scholarly publications, department/institutional politics, and information about
which male professors to stay away from (due to bad track records of harassing
female colleagues). Often times, these meshworks serve as the second home for
many newly arrived Chinese women doctoral students and even a point of contact
for their anxious parents in China.

Common Experience-Based Meshworks

Common experience-based meshworks are initiated by Chinese women scientists

and engineers but its members could be any international women doctoral students
or professionals working in the science and engineering fields. The members
of this kind of meshwork usually share common experiences, which are mostly

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negative, in their interactions with American professors and colleagues, or involve

nationality-based discrimination in their graduate programs or workplaces.
This kind of meshwork provides an effective platform for not only Chinese but
other immigrant women scientists and engineers as well for brainstorming and
strategizing ways to cope with the challenges that arise from their daily scholarly
and professional work life. Many personal matters, such as finding a spouse or
taking care of aging parents, are often also discussed through these meshworks, and
resources are shared to help members to cope with difficult situations.

Career Goal-Based Meshworks

Career goal-based meshworks primarily focus on career advancement and

professional development. Members consist mostly of highly educated Chinese
scientists and engineers. Unlike the previous two types of meshworks, members
do not usually have shared educational experiences. They might be connected
through a common friend or a former classmate but studying or working in the same
geographic region serves as the major reason to bond them. Job openings, career
development opportunities, workshops, and conference information are often shared
within these groups.
Members are connected through social media and are well aware of each other’s
specialties and current projects. They do not meet on a regular basis as a group but
will be the first point of contact when the appropriate career opportunities come
up. Very few of the members hold key positions in their organizations or can make
hiring decisions, but information is always circulated and appreciated within this
meshwork.

Unlike other ethnic-based diaspora networks (e.g., Chinese scientists and engineers
in the Silicon Valley), the guanxi meshworks established among Chinese women
scientists and engineers are not exclusive. They do not require the members to have
strong connections; members do not have to have a high status in their fields in order
to be part of these meshworks. Based on my observation, the reason for the creation
of many of these guanxi meshworks among Chinese women is their marginalized
position in the U.S. science and engineering academia and workforce, and their
limited access to mainstream North American physical sciences and engineering
networks and resources. Many of these meshworks serve as a tool to help them
survive the challenges and discrimination they face on a daily basis.

IMPORTANCE OF PROFESSIONAL CONFERENCES

Most of the women worked in different geographic locations and many of

them reported experiencing various degrees of “alienation” in their “lonely
graduate school career[s].” Many of them therefore emphasized the importance
of conferences, where they could physically meet and gather with others, in

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networking, and specifically in identifying and connecting with Chinese mentors

who could provide them with professional and personal advice. A PhD student in
earth sciences expressed her views on the importance of attending professional
conferences in her field:
I think doing science could be a very lonely journey. I think that’s what these
conferences are there for. We talked about this, the importance of conferences,
too, of networking, and that lets you unconsciously search out potential
mentors. Even if you’re not thinking along those lines, you’re still thinking,
“This person is ahead of me by this much and they are friendly to me. I feel
like I can talk to them and go to them for support at any time.”
This doctoral student portrayed conferences as arenas for many Chinese
doctoral  students to meet other Chinese women mentors and to get effective
feedback. Given that many women reported dysfunctional relationships with their
mentors in their doctoral programs, attending conferences appeared to be a very
rational and necessary coping strategy. Eighty-five percent of the participants
mentioned their experiences attending various conferences and woman-oriented
sessions. All participants agreed that it was a very good experience talking to other
women and connecting with people in the same field. A fourth-year engineering
doctoral student discussed her encouraging experience attending a Women’s
Environmental Council meeting:
It’s just a whole bunch of women who are really friendly towards the cause and
they’re just, they don’t really talk about their being women, they just kind of
just say, OK, this is a group that is just composed of people who don’t have as
much representation in the field. So then I think it’s just, it’s just good in the
sense that everyone can get together and be like, OK, we’re still people, we
still have rights, so we can kind of fight for it.
It was widely believed among the interviewed women that attending conference
activities that were specifically geared towards women, particularly Chinese
women, had an especially important impact on them. They realized that these events
were not about “complaining about discriminatory behaviors” or “hating their male
colleagues.” They were more focused on providing “a sense of community” and a
“supportive network” where women at different levels of their careers could “get
together, share what is going on in their lives, share resources, and sometimes
collaborate on research projects.”
This kind of practice was not only prevalent in engineering, but was also common
in the physical sciences, as reflected by an astronomy doctoral candidate:
I usually attend the meetings organized by the American Astronomical Society
Division of Planetary Science. It’s the same group of women who belong to
other fields. There is a lunar and planetary conference that’s not technically
through the same organization but the same group of women would come

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together and made sure there is a room or things are available so that women
can have more access. They have a lunch or dinner at these all the time and
people bring issues. For example, Chinese women at smaller colleges have
issues accessing journals. You can’t access journals because you are a smaller
institution … get on this mailing list with everyone … and we’ll email you the
articles you need. So to a certain extent, we have much more networking than
the guys have.
This comment reflected the extent of the networks built among Chinese and
other women physical scientists. Not only were Chinese women doctoral students
benefiting from these types of networks, but also women faculty who had less
access to professional resources. Unfortunately, about 80 percent of the women in
the present study reported that their departments or previous graduate programs
had no particular program that provided a platform for women to support each
other. Disappointed by the lack of such mechanisms within their departments and
institutions, many Chinese women in this study found more encouragement and
advice from the Chinese women they met at professional conferences.
A doctoral student in civil engineering described her experience attending a
conference’s social event and her subsequent encounter with a Chinese woman
professor in the field as an “eye opening milestone.” It was the second time this
student had attended the annual meeting of the American Society of Civil Engineers.
There, she met a woman assistant professor from a different university who shared
some fairly disturbing experiences of trying to “break into the old boys’ club” and
the challenges that she faced in advancing as a serious scholar and developing a solid
reputation in her field.
She reflected on the conversations with this assistant professor and on the
significance of having such interactions at professional conferences:
It’s definitely good to have outspoken people like her who will say that to the
people in our generation because she was sitting around … basically with the
next generation of faculty in our field and for her to just come out and say that
[it’s a very challenging field to break into] … I was glad … It’s validating to
hear something like this from a woman professor. Now, I’m at least prepared
to be facing all these situations.
This student stayed in touch with the female professor following the conference
and she has provided much effective feedback on how to prepare to pursue an
academic career as a Chinese woman.
Conferences are an inseparable part of scientific careers. Graduate students
learn about the value and importance of participating in conferences from the very
beginning of their doctoral studies. However, the real benefits of meeting more
people and exchanging scholarly ideas do not normally register with students until
they “incidentally benefit” from the network that they “unintentionally” built through
conference meetings. Many Chinese ethnic group dinners and coffee sessions are

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organized at these conferences through an informal meshwork of Chinese women

scientists and engineers. These gatherings are rarely listed as part of the conference
agendas but are consistently happening at each conference and have established their
effectiveness in helping Chinese women engineers and scientists to launch, advance,
and succeed in their careers.
Some of the participants received generous help with career decisions from the
Chinese women professors they met at conferences. Others got involved with various
women’s sessions at different annual conferences, where they encountered women
mentors. Almost all of the women in the present study admitted that they had not
realized the importance of attending conferences at the beginning of their graduate
studies. Now, as they looked back upon their graduate careers to date, they realized
that the gradual networking and involvement in various professional conferences
and Chinese networks had benefited them to a great extent.
A fourth-year engineering doctoral candidate reflected on her past conference-
going experiences and how she gradually became more involved in her organization.
The network she established through the conference was helping her with her present
career move due to its nexus of industry and academia:
There is this conference I started to attend two years ago, American Institute
of Chemical Engineers. So it’s like this main conference for the chemical
engineering society … I’m attending this workshop organized by this women
initiatives committee, so that’s not necessarily just for academic positions …
but that’s a combined group of women … both in industry and academia …
in chemical engineering. So I’m going to go this year to network with my
potential employers. I applied for a travel grant from them and I got it. I’m
actually looking forward to meeting them. Different from conferences in many
other fields, engineering conferences are usually attended by both academics
and people from the industry. As such, they serve as a great platform for
graduate students to learn from and network with professionals from the
industry or professors from other institutions. Whether or not a student chooses
to work in academia, employers usually require prospective job candidates to
have at least three recommendation letters. In most student participants’ cases,
these letters came from professors with whom they worked throughout their
graduate studies.
Many of the relationships built through these conferences play extremely
important roles in Chinese women’s career development process.

THE BENEFITS OF LONG-TERM COLLEGIALITY

The participants in this study noted that “community building” and networking
does not start in graduate school. The communities and support networks of these
woman scientists and engineers were generally extensions of their undergraduate
institutions where they were first socialized into their fields of study. This network

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included undergraduate friends, some of whom were also pursuing graduate

education; friends they met through GRE/TOFEL test prep centers;3 women faculty
members with whom they worked or who had largely encouraged them to stay
in science and engineering; and undergraduate women from other institutions
whom the students might have met through summer internships or through other
circumstances.
Graduate school provides Chinese women doctoral students with a platform
to establish and expand their individual networks beyond departmental and
institutional boundaries. Some of these nexuses are built on the collegiality
established between more advanced women doctoral students, some are based on
inter-campus collaborations, and others are built through interacting with women
faculty members at conferences. At a time when these women face perplexing
career choices, must complete doctoral dissertations, and need to conclude their
research projects, they must utilize the resources they have accumulated to ease
their transitions.
A fifth-year doctoral candidate described her experiences with a women professor
at her undergraduate institution. During her senior year in college, she felt that she
could never make a career in the hard sciences and went to the professor’s office and
started crying. Although this woman professor did not know her too well, she took
on the role of mentor and encouraged her to join the professor’s lab. Working more
closely with this student, the women professor helped the student apply for graduate
school in the U.S., and still provides her with career and personal advice. Now, this
doctoral student is moving to a major east-coast city for her very first postdoctoral
appointment in a few months. She reflected on this experience:
I think she has been a tremendous influence on shaping my thought of going to
graduate school. She still occasionally skypes me or e-mails me to encourage
me to keep going and give me advice. We are in different fields now but her
career advices are extremely helpful.
In the case of this participant, her mentor contributed to major career changes. She
was not confident enough to continue her undergraduate study in physical sciences.
Yet, with the continuous guidance and encouragement from her woman mentor, she
is now actively pursing a career in academia.
In a nearly dismal job market for physical sciences PhDs due to budget cuts
imposed on various space programs funded by the federal government, having
industry connections is extremely beneficial. A fifth-year space science doctoral
candidate acknowledged the significance of her college friend’s recommendation
in her search for employment. One of her friends, who started her postdoctoral
position at the University of Texas, told her that there was a research group that
might be interested in the type of research that this interviewee does. As a result,
she applied for a postdoctoral fellowship with the university and was accepted.
Due to visa constraints, Chinese women are rarely engaged in any government-
funded projects. They told me that they are excluded from the announcements and

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the networks, and that their advisers usually do not tell them anything about NASA
opportunities, as “they would not be eligible anyway.”
I was curious about exactly what these Chinese women scientists and engineers
missed out on by being denied access to government funded projects. I was able to
interview some American women space physicists. Among them, a soon-to-be doctor
in a physical sciences department had worked for NASA during an undergraduate
summer internship in her sophomore year. There she met a group of young scientists
passionate about space physics research, some of who went on to graduate school,
scattered among various institutions in the U.S. They have kept in touch and have
begun holding annual get-togethers at their professional meetings. Some of the
greatest benefits, according to her, are the resources, information, and opportunities
this network of people shares. Several years after graduation many of them have
moved into higher positions at various national space research laboratories and are
able to provide each other key information regarding job openings and promotional
opportunities. But most Chinese women scientists would not have the opportunity
to participate in NASA undergraduate internships, and thus have zero connections
through this channel. However, this does not significantly affect them in NASA
career paths, as very few of them are eligible anyway due to citizenship status and
security concerns.
A Chinese chemical engineering doctoral candidate expressed her interest in
going into industry one year before finishing graduate school. She discussed the
most crucial aspect of securing a job in the industry and how she would utilize her
connections from her undergraduate years to boost her competiveness:
Conferences are really important if you want to go to academia because those
professors are there and you want them to know your name before applying for
those positions. For industry, the more contacts you know the better. So I will
try to reconnect with some of my college classmates who came to the U.S. for
graduate school and went into industry.
While graduate school was referred to by many women doctoral students as a
“lonely” experience, it also provided myriad opportunities for doctoral students to
meet a number of scholars and broaden their existing networks through collaboration
with inter-disciplinary teams. Women reported that this kind of experience
positively affected their career paths prior to graduation. For example, a Chinese
doctoral engineering student was looking for funding during her second year as her
previous fellowship was running out. As part of the larger project, she began doing
some testing work for a material science research group at a different university.
Over time, she developed a strong rapport with one member of the research team.
Although they have never met, they have published two papers together and are
planning to present the results from their latest research together at an upcoming
conference. Due to this kind of interaction, this Chinese engineer started thinking
about her career path earlier than most of the other Chinese women interviewed for
the present study.

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WOMEN PEERS AND CAREER DEVELOPMENT

Choosing an interesting, reasonable, and balanced career path was reported to be a

major concern of all research participants, and the guanxi networks played important
roles in helping these women both determine their career paths and attain their
goals. Although national security restraints and visa/immigration-related concerns
were prevelant among Chinese doctoral students, many Chinese women noted the
important impact that more advanced Chinese women colleagues’ career moves had
on their own career decision-making processes. One interviewee said, “It was not
until the more senior women doctoral students started talking about careers, [that] I
realized that we should really be thinking about it too.”
An advanced earth sciences doctoral student discussed how a career discussion
between a group of advanced doctoral women inspired her to start thinking about
career-related matters:

There’s this small group of Chinese women who are going to be graduating
this year … and they have been talking about it [job applications]. They never
really talked about careers with their advisers in the past. But now they are
giving me tips about job application. I guess that is kind of interesting to start
thinking about it now because obviously it’s good to talk about it when you are
applying. It’s probably also good to prepare for it before applying to figure out
a little more about what you want to do.

This participant’s comment touched upon a somewhat surprising, yet common,

phenomenon among the Chinese women students I studied – they rarely thought
about how to prepare for a career until the last year or even just the last few months
of their doctoral programs. The lack of proper guidance and direction when it came
to career aspirations left many unprepared in the competitive job market. Nearly
all of the women spent a significant amount of time discussing the problems in
their graduate school careers, caused by, among other things, limited mentoring,
insufficient financial resources, changing advisers, and in one case, having to
completely restart a research project after three years in graduate school.
However, the women also indicated that, no matter how difficult the programs
had been or will be, the career outcomes of their more advanced Chinese women
peers always served as an “ultimate inspiration and motivation” for them to “keep
going” and complete graduate school. Most of them identified a slightly older
Chinese woman mentor who had secured a postdoctoral or researcher position as
a role model who inspired them to complete their doctoral programs. A sixth-year
chemical engineering doctoral student reflected on this general trend among women
who have not had a smooth graduate school career:

Every woman I know who’s gotten a postdoc has moved to a different city.
Some of them got a house with a yard. And it’s just this huge upgrade in salary,
and since they are moving out of major cities their money goes even further. So

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it’s like this magic dreamland over the rainbow “one day, I can pay for my own
health insurance and possibly get a house!” It’s like this ultimate status symbol
and everybody keeps sending picture[s] of their new labs. Even for people
who had really rough graduate careers say, they told me that their postdoctoral
careers are great. It’s those kind of stories that keeps me going.
This view was fairly representative among the participants who did not have
a smooth graduate school career. And in many cases, women doctoral students
based their own academic career decisions on the outcomes of their advanced
women peers’ job placements. One Chinese engineering doctoral student had only
considered careers in the private sector from the first day of her graduate study.
She only began to have second thoughts due to the influence of a more advanced
PhD peer:

I think it [another Chinese woman engineer’s job placement] has played a big
role, really. Because I have seen her, one of the grad students who I considered
as a mentor, going to a postdoctoral position, and she’s been very successful
at a big research university and they are paying her well and she really likes
it, and I want to at least consider it [post doctoral appointment]. So, whereas
I had not considered it at all these last four and half years, actually now that
I’m getting towards the end, I am considering it and looking at what kind of
fellowships are out there for postdocs.

A sixth-year PhD candidate was about to start her postdoctoral career. She had
only applied for one position and had accepted it when she learned that one of her
former Chinese colleagues in her research group was also working in the same
research group. She admitted to me that she felt “bad” only applying for one job.
Yet the research group that she will join had very good credibility in her field and
she knew some people who worked in the group. So she felt that it was a win-win
situation on both the professional and personal levels.
Earlier in the book the findings showed that the vast majority of the Chinese
women only worked with one professor in graduate school and that this trend led
them to fewer opportunities for networking and finding jobs. Yet, many Chinese
scientists have utilized the Chinese network of scientists and engineers to solve this
problem.
For example, Ling was a doctoral student from China. She was younger than
most of the women in her program and she had graduated from one of the top
engineering universities in China. I met her through an American engineer who
was about to finish her PhD in the same department as Ling. When I asked Ling to
describe her relationship with faculty, she stated, in Mandarin: “My adviser is very
nice and smart [but] he’s pretty much the only professor that I’ve been interacting
with during the past three and half years.” When asked about her career objectives,
Ling laughed and said she never thought about anything that related to her future

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career. “I just wanted to be a good scientist and finish my PhD” Ling mumbled
shyly. I was somewhat taken back by her comment given that she was only one year
away from graduation.
I asked her about talking to her adviser regarding job searching and career
aspirations. Ling laughed and said, “No! I only talk about science to my adviser,
nothing else!” However, Ling indicated that three universities in China specialized
in space physics (as mentioned above), and that most of the students she interacted
with in her doctoral program were from one of these three universities. These women
formed a strong bond, which included weekly dinners together, and helped Ling
acquaint herself with her new country, city, and doctoral program:
We exchanged ideas about how to deal with our advisers. Some of my friends’
advisers are not always available to their students. They seldom see their
advisers. Some advisers are very busy with their own research and companies,
so they don’t really care about what their students are doing. That’s frustrating.
We gradually learned to share our resources, give each other feedback on our
research, and suggest to each other how to apply for certain grants.
As I was organizing the final draft of this manuscript, I was able to interview Ling
right before she moved to Silicon Valley to pursue her first real job. Ling referred
to this experience as “bittersweet.” Ling was happy that she was finally able to
find a job where they were willing to sponsor her H-1B visa. The bitter part of the
experience comes from the regret that she did not receive any mentoring regarding
her job search and career preparation during her doctoral programs. It took Ling over
one year of job searching to realize that she probably needed to completely switch
fields in order to find a decently paid job at a good location. She felt devastated that
she had to completely “give up” the space physics that she had devoted her life to
for the past 15 years.
Last but not least, Ling also told me that she knew she was not getting equal pay
compared to her domestic counterparts in the company, but that she was okay with it.
“This company promised to sponsor my H-1B visa and soon a permanent residency
card. Even if I am getting paid less now, it will be all worth it in the long run,” Ling
smiled. The harsh reality is that Ling’s story is shared by many immigrant Chinese
women scientists and engineers.

CAREER DECISIONS AND CONNECTIONS

Many Chinese women in this study acknowledged the fact that networking with
potential employers and getting one’s name established in professional circles would
be great ways to boost a doctoral candidate’s competitiveness. But deciding on a job
can be a two-way decision-making process, involving the department and university
as well. While doctoral candidates are working hard to show potential employers
how qualified they are, they tend to forget that the department’s culture is something

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that every job candidate should examine and consider before accepting a position
that they ultimately will not really enjoy.
This kind of circumstance was clearly identified by a fifth-year doctoral candidate
in engineering, who discussed her strategies on how to utilize her network of scholars
to advise her in the decision-making process:
I applied for this job at [a university] but I wasn’t sure about the group whom
I would be working with. So I talked to a few researchers that I met at the
conference and asked them about the group I would be joining and what I
could be doing there and is it a good fit for me. I also asked them about the
person that I will be working for. Is she a very horrible person who just seems
nice at conferences? If it’s a good career move? Is this university respected?
And also talking to them about what is their life like outside of work. Do they
have work-life balance? Do they enjoy their work? Are they happy about the
decisions that they made? What other options did they have? How did they
find their current positions?
Other aspects of career decision-making criteria that many women spoke about
were the unspoken familial concerns. As most of the Chinese women doctoral
students in physical sciences and engineering directly entered graduate school upon
completion of their undergraduate studies, all women students interviewed were
between 27 and 32 years of age when they started a family while also pursuing a
career. Taking on postdoctoral positions or entering academia does not necessarily
make balancing career and family life easier. While most doctoral women reported
that they were too “embarrassed” to turn to their adviser about such issues, not
wanting to be considered “unserious about their scholarly work” nor “a true scientist,”
women turned to junior women faculty members in their network/community for
mentoring advice.
A doctoral candidate in civil engineering discussed the question of “when to have
your first child” with a woman mentor that she met at a conference during her first
year in graduate school:
She said if I could wait a little bit, I should wait a little while before having a
kid, especially not during the first couple of years after I become an assistant
professor because it’s going to be helpful for me to stay motivated to do
research and finish everything during the first few years to get tenure. She said
when she had kids, they became her most important thing, and it seemed that
she didn’t care about research anymore. It’s good to hear that from a woman
faculty member who has been there and done that.
This student was pleasantly surprised when she had this conversation with the
woman professor. She shared that she was very accustomed to the type of male-
dominated environment in engineering in both China and the U.S. and that she had
almost forgotten that she could “still ask for advice from women mentors!”

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Mentoring in doctoral programs goes beyond training students in research; it is

also reflected through providing them with different perspectives, interpretations,
directions, and results of their research projects. Yet, this is the area that nearly all
women interviewed for this project identified as insufficient. Having a perspective
different from that of their advisers appeared to be extremely helpful to the women
in the present study:
Having this woman mentor [from her undergraduate institution] is important to
me, first because it’s a faculty example to follow and I know I’m not going to
be in the U.S. forever, so to have connections with people at other institutions
is beneficial. We also talk a lot about work and I feel that she has a very
different perspective on our work than my adviser does. Everyone has their
individual biases. So it’s really nice to talk to somebody in that level of details
about my work and get a different perspective and that kind of stuff. I think
she’s made me a better scientist because she teaches things very differently
and doesn’t always agree on what we’re [my adviser and I] doing. But being
able to respond to her questions and her arguments is kind of making me and
my work stronger.
However, this student’s experience of being mentored by a woman professor
outside of her doctoral program was rather unique. Many Chinese women science
and engineering doctoral students shared their frustrations over the lack of
communication and effective mentoring from their advisers. On one hand, they
did respect their professors’ reputations in the field, but on the other they were
not benefiting from their advisers’ reputations or mentoring at all. Some of them
were lucky to reach out to Chinese women professors they had worked with before
or had met at conferences. In those cases, the doctoral students described these
experiences as “beneficial” and “eye-opening.” Note that these “external mentors”
were mostly women.
When I discussed this question with a group of women physical scientists and
engineers after data collection was completed for this project, they suggested three
crucial reasons behind this phenomenon. One, Chinese women professors are
easier to relate to while at conferences, and the special sessions geared towards
women especially provide opportunities for them to meet and network with
women professors, postdocs, and students as well. Two, they felt more comfortable
discussing “soft criteria,” such as family-friendly policies, workplace politics, and
particular career approaches, with Chinese female faculty, as they have been in the
same position before. And three, women students connecting with male professors
on a personal basis beyond conference interaction might invite unnecessary and
unwanted gossip and awkward situations. This was especially a big concern of the
Chinese women doctoral students, who shared all kinds of stories about American
professors trying to take advantage of their Asian women students.

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NOTES
1
Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes. Also see Murillo et al., “Partial Perspectives in Astronomy.”
2
See NASA dictionary of technical terms: http://er.jsc.nasa.gov/seh/m.html
3
TOFEL, which stands for Test of English as a Foreign Language, is a standardized test of English
proficiency for non-native English speakers wishing to enroll in American universities. Many test
preparation centers in China thrive on all kinds of TOFEL preparation classes for countless Chinese
students every year. Among the most reputable ones, New Oriental Education based in Beijing is the
largest provider of private educational services in China. Many Chinese scientists and engineers have
met future connections through their prep classes at New Oriental Education.

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WOMEN’S TRANSNATIONAL NETWORKS

This chapter analyzes Chinese women scientists’ and engineers’ strategies for
establishing and utilizing their transnational networks in advancing their research,
collaborations, and careers. This interpretation is delineated in the broader
context of the global science and engineering space and the transnational science
and engineering knowledge communities. Furthermore, a microcosm of Asian
immigrant scientists, those who have moved to Silicon Valley, is analyzed and
compared to the community of Chinese women studied in this book project.
Given the important role that Chinese scientists and engineers play in
transnational knowledge production, we will begin by visiting the key concepts
regarding the ways that transnational networks are formed. The globalization of
science and engineering knowledge, and in particular the advent of the internet,
requires a paradigm shift in the ways we understand and interpret networks and
communities. They are no longer mere connections or groups of like-minded people.
All kinds of networks and knowledge communities are becoming vital components
of global science and engineering knowledge production.
International research collaborations, technological innovations, talent exchanges,
and global knowledge economy competitions increasingly occur in transnational
science and engineering spaces. Countries that wish to maintain technological
and scientific leadership in the twenty-first century, especially China, India, and
the U.S., but in Europe as well, are creating educational and immigration policies
designed to attract and retain a highly educated workforce.1 This phenomenon is
particularly noticeable in the science and engineering fields, as their development
has been closely associated with the emergence of a knowledge-based economy,
national research and security agendas, and international science and technology
competitiveness.
Current and former international doctoral students from China, India, and other
countries have been key players in and creators of this transnational space. This is
mainly due to the potential research and intellectual contributions that they are able
to make to national science research agendas as educated and skilled migrants.2
Skilled migrants are broadly defined as “those in possession of a tertiary degree or
extensive specialized work experience.”3 This influx of skilled migrants is largely
concentrated in the areas of the physical sciences, finance, and engineering. Most
of these individuals are men, but as this study has shown, an increasing number are
women.

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FEMINIZATION OF MIGRATION

Generations of Asian migration to North America have had a profound impact on

Asian women’s strategies to maintain and shape transnational networks. The global
migration has in turn shaped the development of feminist perspectives when it comes
to Asian women’s lived experiences. Aihwa Ong’s widely read 1999 book Flexible
Citizenship vividly captured ethnographic accounts of Asian migrants and their
transnational experiences as part of the global movers. The migrant trends among
the Asia-Pacific regions have caused a paradigm shift in the study of transitional
migration between U.S. and Asian countries. Some studies have focused on some
migrants’ strategic planning of pregnancy to take advantage of the loopholes in the
U.S. immigration system and secure U.S. citizenship for their children.4 Some other
works have investigated the large number of migrants to particular “off-shore” cities
such as Los Angeles.5
Fundamentally, migrants’ experiences are directly affected by their home nations’
relationship with the U.S. For instance, Chinese scientists’ and engineers’ educational
and work experiences in the U.S. are further complicated by the dependent yet
precarious political and economic relationships that the U.S. and China have been
developing during the past two decades, complex relations that involve thousands
of agencies, both public and private. Tens of thousands of Chinese scientists and
engineers are residing and working in the U.S., and although they play crucial roles
in scientific knowledge production and exchange between the two countries, their
experiences are rarely recorded.
Women’s roles in transnational networks were first recognized during the
“feminization of migration” movement in gender studies of migration. The movement
indicates that women were more likely than men to participate in voluntary migration
and that they served as the key agents to maintain strong transnational ties.6 Even
though gender was taken into consideration, most of these studies have been focused
on unskilled domestic laborers. During my six years of fieldwork with this group of
Chinese women scientists and engineers, I observed that these women played their
“transitional agents” roles when it came to maintaining social ties with their friends,
family, and former colleagues in China. They formed informal groups to help new
Chinese students in their programs and universities to settle in and socialize into
their new home in the U.S.
For instance, a woman computer scientist who had been in the U.S. for over
20 years started organizing welcome events every fall when newly-admitted
Chinese PhD students and postdocs arrived at the university where she had obtained
her PhD. Additionally, she also compiled resources regarding housing, grocery
stores, academic advising, and research to share with new Chinese students. She
has an amazing reputation in the Chinese women community for generously helping
other Chinese women overcome challenges and thrive in their fields. A few months
ago, when a Chinese engineer was let go from her job and did not have enough
money to pay rent, this woman let her stay in her house until the engineer could find

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another position that would sponsor her H-1B visa. The Chinese community has
given her the name da jie (大姐), which means a kind, big sister figure.
This was not the only network existing in the Chinese women’s group I studied, but
most of them would not formally think of, or refer to, these connections as networks.
Often when I brought up the concept, they would laugh and say we are just trying
to help out a tong xiang (同乡), which means the people who come from the same
town. To them it meant another Chinese person who had shared part of their past
experience. It was interesting to observe that even though these women played
key roles in maintaining transnational networks, they did not do so deliberately, or
consider the process as significant.
Transnational networks are often fostered by and based in disciplinary specialties.
For example, there are only a handful of institutions in China that specialize in space
physics: Wuhan University, Peking University, and the University of Science and
Technology of China. A large number of graduates from these programs come to the
U.S. to pursue doctoral studies. Many professors from these programs have either
studied at U.S. institutions or did their postdoctoral work in the U.S. These individuals
are serving as agents within these disciplinary-based transitional networks. New
connections are initiated through introductions from old connections.
These lineages and meshworks are multi-generational, contained mostly within
groups of Chinese scientists and engineers. However, the gender dynamics within
these Chinese networks remain unknown. Discussion and information on this topic
remains scarce and I speculate that due to the sensitive nature of gender dynamics
within a tightly-knit and complicated group, these women have chosen not to discuss
this topic with me (the outsider).
My observations through fieldwork over the course of eight years showed that
Chinese women play only a minor and generally passive role in major transnational
collaborations. They are usually assigned tasks such as taking notes and organizing
meeting logistics. Tasks such as presenting on the behalf of their research groups,
organizing symposia/conferences, managing projects, or partaking in decision-
making process are rarely given to Chinese women.
Studies of transnational networks were generally gender-blind until the late
1990s. Up to then race and ethnicity were the primary focal point for studying
transnational communities and their knowledge-sharing processes.7 Other variables,
such as gender, nationality, class and various social variables, came to researchers’
attention during the late 1990s and made scholars realize the significance of studying
the intersectionality of gender, race, ethnicity, nationality and socioeconomic status
when it came to examining a transitional community’s experience and their strategies
for coping with challenges in a new environment.
Chinn’s study on Asian and Pacific Islander women scientists and engineering
undergraduates students found that this group of women’s efforts to pursue science and
engineering education were strongly supported by their families and communities, yet
they still experienced discrimination from both teachers and peers due to race, ethnicity,
and language-related reasons. It was when they transitioned from ­post-­secondary

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institutions to their first jobs that the “model minority” stereotype created the most
conflict. On one hand, they were part of the Asian scientists’ and engineers’ group. On
the other hand, their experience as women in the science and engineering fields was
dramatically different from that of their male Asian counterparts.8
Social networks serve as key channels for scientists and engineers to transmit
critical knowledge that directly affects their funding strategies, career advancement,
and research innovation.9 While Asian-born scientists appear to have many
connections across universities through their extensive educational experiences,
they are generally excluded from major U.S. science and engineering networks.10
This does not mean that every sub-group of Asian-born scientists have the same
experience but it does reflect the pattern of lacking formal and main social network
support that is seen among many Asian-born scientist groups.
Chinese women have even more limited access to mainstream American networks
compared to their male counterparts, yet they were aware of these limits and thus
strategically shared the individual networks they had established along their science
and engineering paths. The vast majority of these networks were built through their
educational endeavors and were in nature largely transnational.
When I asked a group of women Chinese physicists about their experience as
Asians in their institutions and workplaces, nearly all of them pointed out that they
did not understand why they were always grouped in with Asian Americans when it
came to the studies they have encountered. One woman’s voice was representative
of this group’s view:
We just moved here less than five years ago and how can our experience be
the same with second and third generation Asian Americans? A big part of our
challenges are related to language and culture barriers which perhaps Asian
Americans are less likely to encounter.
Chinese immigrant women scientists and engineers constitute a large percentage
of the female Asian population in U.S. science and engineering graduate programs.
Nearly all of the Chinese women scientists and engineers I interacted with all
research sites were Chinese-born. While U.S.-born Chinese American scientists’
lived experiences are equally important, interview and ethnographic data from
this project shows that Chinese-born women believed that their experiences were
dramatically different from that of their U.S.-born counterparts. They attribute the
differed experience to three factors.
First, social and professional support: U.S.-born women scientists usually had
parents and other relatives nearby whom they could reply on for emotional and
social support, especially when they encountered challenges at universities or
workplaces. They were more likely to have professional networks prior to attending
graduate programs or joining the workforce. Second, K-12 and college educational
environment: U.S.-born women scientists and engineers attended U.S. elementary,
secondary, and postsecondary schools and were more familiar with cultural and
social norms. One direct result was that they were more likely than the Chinese-born

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scientists to challenge their teachers/professors and thus were less likely to be taken
advantage of by their male advisers/professors. Third, language and communication:
U.S.-born women scientists could more easily convey their research findings and
ideas with colleagues and professors and they were more likely to challenge their
peers compared to immigrant Chinese women scientists.

A GLOBAL NETWORK OF WOMEN: HOW DO THEY ADVANCE THEIR

CAREERS BEYOND NATIONAL BOUNDARIES?

The role of Chinese and other Asian women scientists’ and engineers’ role in
technology transfer remains relatively unknown, but in studying the relationship
between transnational technology transfer and ethnic scientific communities,
researchers found that over 80 percent of Chinese and Indian scientists in Silicon
Valley reported that they exchanged technical and scientific information with their
home countries on a rather constant basis.11 In his study of the ethnic research
communities in the U.S. and technology diffusion to foreign countries of the same
ethnicity, Kerr found that the strongest correlation between technology transfer and
ethnicities was among the Chinese community of scientists and engineers, who
were a relatively tightly-knit group.12
Previous diaspora studies of international networks have revealed that universities
play a key role in establishing and maintaining international networks of scientists
and engineers, and not just during the period of study. Among the ethnic-based
scientists’ and engineers’ community in the Silicon Valley, alumnae relationships
from universities appear to be crucial. For instance, those who have graduated from
India’s Institutes of Technology or Taiwan’s elite science and engineering universities
have formed strong transnational networks.13 The Chinese Institute of Engineers in
the U.S. organizes annual seminars and collaborates with their counterpart organization
in Taiwan in order to provide consultation services to the Taiwanese government.14
Transnational collaborations, projects that bring together people from different
countries, in this case China and the U.S., are also an important aspect of international
women doctoral students’ networks. A Chinese doctoral student was recently
involved in a transnational collaboration between her undergraduate university in
Shanghai and her graduate program. When asked how she got involved in such a
large-scale collaborative project, she responded:
It was very random at the beginning. A senior classmate of mine got her
doctorate a few years ago and went back to China to become a professor at our
undergraduate institution. She saw a very recent paper that my adviser and I
published together. So she got in touch with me about the potential grant that
we could work on together, so I connected her with my adviser, and the next
thing you know, it turned into a multi-million transnational collaboration!
A similar trend was also observed among other foreign-born scientists and
engineers, especially among the large group of Chinese space physicists who received

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their education in China and then moved to the U.S. to pursue their doctorates and
careers. Many Chinese space physicists, men and women, were acquainted prior to
their doctoral study or scientific careers in the U.S. – not surprising, given the small
community that specializes in space physics in China. Among these scientists, the
women have acted as the organizers for frequent social events at which they discuss
each other’s work and progress, and expand their networks to include advisers and
colleagues from the U.S. A doctoral student from Beijing asserted:
China has Project 985 and many grants to support Chinese scientists to
collaborate with their American colleagues, and my lab needs more money
and we have many talents and potential projects that fit with the parameter of
these grants. So my adviser encouraged an American postdoc and I to work
on a grant proposal together to submit to the Chinese Academy of Science. Of
course, we are also working with my undergraduate adviser in Beijing. He has
a big lab and tons of connections there!
While collaboration was widely observed between Chinese and American
scientists, one obvious difference existed in their research processes: the requirements,
and even awareness, of the previously mentioned “soft criteria (e.g., work-life
balance, family friendly policy, other researchers’ styles, and internal politics).”
For instance, many soon-to-be graduated Chinese women physical scientists and
engineers were less familiar with the concepts of a “family-friendly policy,” or
“salary and spousal employment negotiation,” and were less concerned about the
institution’s geographic location and institutional climate. To many of these women,
“conducting effective and significant research” was the top priority, followed closely
by visa sponsorship concerns. Yet, overlooking the soft criteria could limit the long-
term professional growth potential of these scientists and make them more prone to
dealing with extra financial burdens and discriminatory treatment in the workplace.

TRANSNATIONAL NETWORK FORMATION AND GLOBALIZATION

OF SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING KNOWLEDGE

When I was doing fieldwork at the physical sciences and engineering departments
at a major research university in the western region of the U.S., I interacted with
many international women scientists and engineers on a daily basis, especially those
who where Chinese. This university’s science and engineering departments were in
many ways a microcosmic reflection of the science and engineering workforce in the
U.S., including the presence of large numbers of Asians. Mandarin was often spoken
among the Chinese women scientists and engineers I met there, and on multiple
occasions, many of them told me that they felt more comfortable sharing ideas and
knowledge and discussing challenges in Mandarin.
Vertovec defined transnationalism as the multiple ties and engagements that
connect people, organizations, or universities across the boundaries of nation
states.15 His study found that many informal networks were formed by Chinese

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women scientists and engineers, and that much information and knowledge was
circulated through these networks; yet these were not recognized by either the
migration studies scholars or by the women themselves as main tools of knowledge
production and disbursement.
Many of these networks were formed based on common identity. In a study of
transnational social spaces, Kennedy found that despite these networks not being
formally recognized many “small, cohesive and relatively durable networks [were]
built around affective relationships.”16 Many of these “affective relationships” were
the direct result of the global expansion of investment in higher education and the
increasing ease of international exchanges.
Freeman identified the five main aspects of global knowledge circulation of
science and engineering professions. Three of them are particularly relevant to this
study: (1) the vast expansion of higher education worldwide; (2) the dramatic growth
in the number of international students in the United States; and (3) the increased
migration to the U.S. of Asian-born scientists and engineers and their more active
participation in the science and engineering workforce there, which has created
strong channels and connections for international collaborations.17

Vast Expansion of Higher Education in China

The first aspect is closely related to the rapid expansion of higher education in China.
During the past two decades, China has massively invested in higher education,
particularly in science and engineering education. Data from the Chinese Ministry
of Education shows that the enrollment of students in science and engineering in all
colleges and universities in China jumped from 3.5 percent in 1993 to 36 percent
in 2013. In 2013, China graduated 6.38 million undergraduate students and a vast
majority of them hold degrees in science and engineering. A further indication of this
rapid growth is the number of science and engineering PhDs that China graduates,
which has been increasing at a rate higher than in the U.S.18 During the 1970s,
China did not graduate many science and engineering PhDs at all. Yet, in 2004,
China graduated 23,000 PhDs and over 60 percent of them were from scientific
and engineering fields.19 Even though Ong has argued that the statistics provided
by China are not being collected through the same methods with the same criteria
compared to the U.S. data, this rapid growth rate has still brought about much
attention from both governments and policymakers.20

Dramatic Growth in International Graduate Students in the U.S.

Second, the dramatic growth in numbers of international students in U.S. higher

education institutions is another strong indicator of the growth of global knowledge
networks. An Open Doors report administered by the Institute of International
Higher Education showed that the number of international students in the U.S.
grew nearly six-fold between 1975 and 2010.21 The majority of these students were

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enrolled in graduate school. Furthermore, the workforce makeup in U.S. science and
engineering fields is increasingly occupied by foreign-born scientists and engineers.
According to the 2014 Science and Engineering Indicator Report:
In 2010, at the bachelor’s degree level, the proportion of foreign-born
individuals in science and engineering occupations ranged from 13% (physical
scientists) to 23% (computer and mathematical scientists). However, at the
doctoral level, over 40% were foreign-born in each science and engineering
occupation except the social sciences.22

Increased Migration to the U.S. of Asian-Born Scientists and Engineers

Third, Asian-born scientists’ and engineers’ increased migration to the U.S. and their
more active participation in the science and engineering workforce have created
strong channels and connections for international collaborations. Between 1990
and 2005, the number of doctoral degree recipients in science and engineering
programs increased from 24 percent to 40 percent.23 In the meantime, the science
and engineering workforce data shows that the vast majority of the foreign-born
scientists and engineers working in the U.S. have obtained their highest degrees
here.24
The 2014 science and engineering Indicators Report highlighted two interesting
statistics. Nearly 90 percent of all Asian scientists and engineers employed in the
U.S. are foreign-born.25 “In 2010, the leading country of origin among immigrants
with a highest degree in science and engineering was India, which accounted for
19  percent of the foreign-born science and engineering highest degree holders.
With less than half the total for India, China was the second leading country with
8 percent.”26
However, the gender breakdown among the foreign-born scientists and engineers
in the workforce remains unclear. This leaves us the question: what happened to
women’s visibility and voices in the transnational knowledge production process?
To answer this question, we first need to examine the major types of transnational
networks and how they form and operate. Global networks have been a main channel
for scholars to study transnationalism.27 Within this literature, many scholars have
focused on studying these transnational networks from the angle of transnational
capitalism and the mass transnational networks that global companies rely on to
expand their influence and economic growth.28
However, the research projects that study large corporations’ transnational ties
have tended to underestimate the power of the informal, trivial, and fictive kinship
connections that their employees play in driving these transnational knowledge
and technological exchanges. Consequently, a series of studies have focused their
attention on the informal, smaller, yet durable networks that are built based on
transnational professional and personal networks, university connections, similar
overseas experiences, and similar ethnic and linguistic backgrounds.29 While these

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Chinese women scientists and engineers make up a big portion of the U.S. science
and engineering workforce, the transnational ties they curate over time have rarely
been studied.
The women scientists and engineers in this study did not regard the types of
connections they had as “transnational networks”; rather, these trust, ethnicity, and
educational institutional-based ties were considered to be their coping strategies.
Nevertheless, the Chinese scientists and engineers in this study demonstrated several
of the transnational professional traits described in Kennedy’s 2004 study. However,
in three ways I found that their traits and experiences differed from the traditional
ones of most migrants and disaporic members.
First, while all of these women scientists and engineers came to the U.S. to
pursue their graduate studies or professional endeavors, few of their activities were
influenced or were helped by family or the kinship ties they have from China.
Second, Kennedy argued that transnational professionals rarely transfer non-work
cultural practices and activities into their host societies. Contrarily, a clear pattern of
transferring Chinese cultural practices into their work and collaborations in the U.S.
was observed in this study. The bonds created by both common cultural heritage
and their educational experiences were key factors in Chinese women’s science and
engineering networks.
Third, even though this group of women was not connected to other Chinese
scientists and engineers via preexisting primordial ties that resemble what migrants
and diasporic members have, they did not in any way enjoy the high level of
employment freedom, personal relationships, and legal rights described in Kennedy’s
study of transnational professionals.
The formation of these translational ties observed among the Chinese women
scientists and engineers was largely based on their educational experiences,
disciplinary influences, and transnational experiences. For example, one woman
Chinese postdoc’s social and transnational ties may have consisted of her former
classmates who studied in the same undergraduate institutions/departments in
China, undergraduate professors and their professional/personal connections in
the U.S., and their colleagues (many of them were international students/scholars).
As a Chinese woman doctoral student moves forward in her career path, her social
networks expand but national culture, shared language, transnational experience,
and discipline always play key roles in the process.
Geographically, Chinese women scientists and engineers tend to be in favor of
choosing positions along the west coast of the U.S. Only a small number of them
moved to small towns to pursue academic careers. A large number of them stayed on
the West Coast, mostly moving to Silicon Valley, with a few going to big cities on the
East Cost. In most cases, these Chinese women had left their original fields of study.
They secured these career positions through previously established connections from
graduate school, undergraduate institutions in China, or their spouses’ networks of
scientists and engineers.

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Other commonly discussed geographic locations were Singapore, Hong Kong,

or Taiwan, since many Chinese women scientists felt that these locations would be
geographically in proximity to home, so if family emergencies happened they could
return in a timely manner. They also spoke about their responsibilities for taking
care of aging parents and noted these countries would make their parents feel more
comfortable as the local language in all three places is Chinese. A couple of research
participants also cited the importance of abundant pay and academic freedom as key
incentives for working in Singapore, Hong Kong, or Taiwan, compared with China.
Given that Silicon Valley plays a strategically significant role in global science
and engineering spaces, it is useful to conclude this chapter with a discussion of the
Silicon Valley high-tech migrants. Silicon Valley serves as a vortex of transnational
science and engineering activities. Many brain circulation activities occur in this
transnational space. Although many studies of Silicon Valley overlook gender as a
category in shaping migrant scientists’ and engineers’ experiences and transnational
ties, they are undoubtedly helpful in giving us a larger context of the increasingly
significant role that foreign-born, especially Chinese and Indian scientists, play in
transnational knowledge production, circulation, and innovation.
A NSF report showed that between 2008 and 2011, compared to Taiwanese,
Korean, and Japanese students, Chinese (86 percent) and Indian (87 percent) science
and engineering graduate students were more likely to stay in the U.S. upon their
graduation. Many of these scientists and engineers moved to Silicon Valley for their
first American career positions.
One reason for the popularity of Silicon Valley, and California in general, among
Chinese scientists and engineers, is simply its geographic location. Chinese scientists
and engineers living there are able to gain a tremendous competitive edge through
the networks they have been able to build in both China and the U.S. They felt that
the culture of Silicon Valley was very open to accepting “foreigners,” as evidenced
by their positive experiences working there.
In a large-scale study of venture capital industries and their connections with
Silicon Valley, Saxenian discovered that by early 2000, “venture capital and private
equity firms were investing more than one billion annual in enterprises located in
China.”30 Even though this number is merely a fraction of the investments made in
the U.S. each year, such a phenomenon sends a strong signal that the transnational
networks built through China-born scientists and engineers are playing key roles
in transferring not only capital but also fresh technological knowledge through the
transnational space. Other studies have shown that since 1998, one out of five high-
tech start-ups in Silicon Valley were led by ethnic Chinese. Immigrants from China
and Taiwan were key founders in 13 percent of all start-ups in Silicon Valley between
1995 and 2005.31 Yet, women scientists and engineers are rarely seen in leadership
positions in the Silicon Valley.32
The vast majority of the Chinese women doctoral students I studied gave up
the academic career path and moved to Silicon Valley upon completion of their
doctorates. However, many of them have changed their disciplines completely;

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 WOMEN’S TRANSNATIONAL NETWORKS

for example, many Chinese women physicists I worked with have entered the
financial and actuarial industries. Many Chinese women scientists preferred to
seek employment in large coastal cities, which have many opportunities in these
industries. The financial and actuarial industries highly value coding and statistical
modeling knowledge, which are a big part of graduate school training for many
physicists. These industries thus are more likely than others to sponsor many
immigrant scientists’ work visas in the U.S.
Given that it was only a few years ago that many Chinese women began working
in Silicon Valley, the career advancement patterns for Chinese women there remain
unknown. But their numbers there are growing, and this will be an interesting topic
of research for the next five to ten years.

NOTES
1
Geddie, “The Transnational Ties That Bind.”
2
Christopher Ziguras and Siew-Fang Law, “Recruiting International Students as Skilled Migrants: The
Global ‘Skills Race’ as Viewed from Australia and Malaysia,” Globalisation, Societies and Education
4, no. 1 (2006): 59–76.
3
Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context and Practice
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
4
Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1999).
5
Wei Li, “Anatomy of a New Ethnic Settlement: The Chinese Ethnoburb in Los Angeles,” Urban
Studies 35, no. 3 (1998): 479–501. Paul M. Ong, Edna Bonacich, and Lucie Cheng, The New Asian
Immigration in Los Angeles and Global Restructuring (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press,
1994). Richard Wright and Mark Ellis, “The Ethnic and Gender Division of Labor Compared Among
Immigrants to Los Angeles,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24 no. 3 (2000):
583–600.
6
Katie Willis and Brenda Yeoh, “Gendering Transnational Communities: A Comparison of Singaporean
and British Migrants in China,” Geoforum 33, no. 4 (2002): 553–565.
7
Willis and Yeoh, “Gendering Transnational Communities.”
8
Pauline W. U. Chinn, “Asian and Pacific Islander Women Scientists and Engineers: A Narrative
Exploration of Model Minority, Gender, and Racial Stereotypes,” Journal of Research in Science
Teaching 39, no. 4 (2002): 302–323, doi:10.1002/tea.10026
9
Etzkowitz et al., Athena Unbound.
10
Roli Varma, “High-Tech Coolies: Asian Immigrants in the US Science and Engineering Workforce,”
Science as Culture 11, no. 3 (2002): 337–361.
11
AnnaLee Saxenian, “Silicon Valley’s New Immigrant High-Growth Entrepreneurs,” Economic
Development Quarterly 16, no. 1 (2002): 20–31, doi:10.1177/0891242402016001003.
12
William R. Kerr, “Ethnic Scientific Communities and International Technology Diffusion.” Review of
Economics and Statistics 90, no. 3 (2008): 518–537.
13
AnnaLee Saxenian, Silicon Valley’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs (San Francisco: Public Policy
Institute of California, 1999).
14
Robert E. B. Lucas, “Diaspora and Development: Highly Skilled Migrants from East Asia”
(Boston: Boston University Department of Economics, 2001), http://www.bu.edu/econ/files/2012/11/
dp120.pdf
15
Steven Vertovec, Transnational Networks and Skilled Labour Migration (Oxford: University of
Oxford. Transnational Communities Programme, 2002).
16
Paul Kennedy, “Making Global Society: Friendship Networks among Transnational Professionals in
the Building Design Industry,” Global Networks 4, no. 2 (2004): 161.

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17
Richard B. Freeman, “Globalization of Scientific and Engineering Talent: International Mobility of
Students, Workers, and Ideas and the World Economy,” Economics of Innovation and New Technology
19, no. 5 (2010): 393–406, doi:10.1080/10438590903432871.
18
Aihwa Ong. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.1999).
19
Richard B. Freeman, Science and Engineering Careers in the United States: An Analysis of Markets
and Employment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
20
Ong, Flexible Citizenship.
21
Institute of International Education, Open Doors Report: Report on International Education
Exchange (Institute of International Education, 2011), http://www.iie.org/Research-and-Publications/
Publications-and-Reports/IIE-Bookstore/Open-Doors-2011 (accessed March 8, 2015).
22
National Science Foundation, “Science and Engineering Indicator: 2014.”
23
Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Current Issues in Chinese
Higher Education (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2001), http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264188686-en
24
Freeman, Science and Engineering Careers in the United States.
25
National Science Foundation, “Science and Engineering Indicator: 2014.”
26
National Science Foundation, “Science and Engineering Indicator: 2014,” 1.
27
Chan, B. K. 1997. “A Family Affair: Migration, Dispersal and the Emergent Identity of the Chinese
Cosmopolitan,” Diaspora 6, 195–213; Vertovec and Cohen, Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory,
Context and Practice.
28
Leslie Sklair, The Transnational Capitalist Class (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001); William K. Carroll
and Colin Carson, “The Network of Global Corporations and Elite Policy Groups: A Structure for
Transnational Capitalist Class Formation?” Global Networks 3, no. 1 (2003): 29–57.
29
Ulf Hannerz, “Macro-Scenarios: Anthropology and the Debate Over Contemporary and Future
Worlds,” Social Anthropology 11, no. 2 (2003): 169–197; Kennedy, “Making Global Society.”
30
AnnaLee Saxenian, “From Brain Drain to Brain Circulation: Transnational Communities and Regional
Upgrading in India and China,” Studies in Comparative International Development 40, no. 2 (2005):
37, doi:10.1007/BF02686293.
31
See Vivek Wadhwa, AnnaLee Saxenian, and F. Daniel Siciliano. America’s New Immigrant
Entrepreneurs: Then and Now (Kansas City, MO: Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, 2012). Also
see Iris Xiaohong Quan and Anna Lee Saxenian, “Globalization of Entrepreneurship: Evidence from
a Survey of Chinese and Indian Immigrant Professionals in Silicon Valley,” Journal of Management
of Innovation and Entrepreneurship 4 (2009): 36–64, http://works.bepress.com/iris_quan/32/
32
Vivek Wadhwa and Farai Chideya, Innovating Women: The Changing Face of Technology (New York:
Diversion Books, 2014).

194
 SECTION V
REFLECTIONS AND CONCLUSIONS:
CHINESE FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES
 CHAPTER 15

REFLECTIONS

Through the nearly one decade of ethnographic work with Chinese immigrant
women scientists and engineers and the process of writing this book, I came to
realize that these women are stuck in between two worlds of dreams: On one hand,
they are outstanding scholars who are pursuing a freer lifestyle and greater potential
career possibilities in the U.S., yet remain marginalized in the U.S. science and
engineering educational community, with fewer mentoring opportunities, less access
to major networks, and limited possibilities for career advancement. On the other
hand, they are not returning to China to pursue the traditional sense of the “Chinese
Dream,” which Chinese President Xi Jinping has defined as “national rejuvenation,
improvement of people’s livelihoods, prosperity, construction of a better society and
a strengthened military.”1
Regardless of the challenges they are facing in the U.S., these women are nearly
all deciding to stay in the U.S. and to build their networks through personal and
informal professional ties. Their knowledge, coping strategies, and courage inspire
me. Even if they are doing the “heavy lifting” in many scientific projects across
North America, their work and names are rarely recognized, and data on them are
missing from major studies of the U.S. science and engineering workforce. Yet they
rarely complain. Instead, they strategically survive in the margins, primarily by
sharing tacit knowledge within Chinese women scientist circles. The transnational
networks built and maintained by these Chinese women are powerful in U.S. science
and engineering research and innovation. Yet, credit is rarely given to these women.
Can Chinese feminist perspectives expand our understanding of this situation?
The theoretical lenses I propose are inspired by the analyses of postcolonial feminism
and U.S. feminists of color. These lenses are also informed by current and past debate
within Chinese feminist circles. When it comes to studying international immigrant
women scientists and engineers, only when researchers start from these women’s
lives and voices can the research be impactful and change-provoking. Even though
in this study I used a form of methodological lens derived from Chinese women’s
experience, I think it could apply to studies of many other groups of international
women who move to the U.S. to pursue their education and careers.

ASIAN SCIENTISTS IN THE U.S.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s official definitions, the term “Asians”
refers to people from a number of Asian regions, countries, and territories, listed in

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Table 5. Note that this definition of Asian includes what most people would consider
to be Middle Eastern countries, not often thought of as Asian.

Table 5. Asian countries included in the U.S. Census definition

Regions Countries

Eastern Asia China, Hong Kong, Japan, Macau, Mongolia, North Korea,
Paracel Islands, South Korea and Taiwan
South Central Asia Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Iran, Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan,
Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan
South Eastern Asia Brunei, Burma (Myanmar), Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos,
Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam
Western Asia Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Cyprus, Georgia, Iraq, Israel,
Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria,
Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen

Source: U.S. Census Bureau.2

As of 2010, Asians made up approximately 4.8 percent of the U.S. population,

yet close to 20 percent of its scientists and engineers; 2 out of 10 Asian scientists
and engineers and 4 out of 10 of those holding doctorates were foreign-born. By
country of origin, Indian-born scientists and engineers consisted of the largest group
among foreign-born professionals (19 percent), while the second largest group came
from China (8 percent).3 Some of these individuals have achieved prominent places
in U.S. business. For example, two of the leading American companies, Google
and Microsoft, now have CEOs who originally came to the U.S. from India to do
their graduate work.
But these statistics are misleading as they give an impression that Asian scientists
and engineers are the “model minority” in science and thus that they have achieved
equality. However, despite the large representation of Asians in the U.S. science and
engineering workforce, they generally do not have equal chances to be promoted.
Varma described this phenomenon in her study of Asian scientists in Silicon Valley:
They [Asian scientists and engineers] are permitted to work mainly in those
science and engineering roles that are non-competitive with white males.
Such occupations grant Asian immigrants a higher social and economic status
compared with other minorities. Yet, Asian immigrants face structural barriers
in career mobility into positions of authority and power. The general culture
in science and engineering organizations views them as foreigners and holds
back their careers.4
Data on employment status shows that Asian scientists and engineers are
extremely underrepresented in high-ranking management positions in both the

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public and private sectors. They are less likely to be in managerial jobs compared
to their Hispanic and African-American counterparts.5 The largest gap is in
government and national laboratories. Locke’s 2000 study on Asian population
career mobility revealed some interesting data: Asians make up about 4 percent
of scientists in government national laboratories but only 1 percent of those in
management positions.6
The private sector employs the largest number of Asian immigrant scientists
compared to academic institutions and the government, yet only a small number
of Asian scientists are included in management teams and in the decision-making
process. For example, 57 percent of Chinese scientists and engineers in the U.S. are
employed in Silicon Valley high-technology industries but only 16 percent of those
are in managerial positions.7 In academia, Asian immigrants are over-represented
within the graduate student population, yet very few Asian faculty members hold
chair, dean, or provost positions.8
This phenomenon could be described as glass ceiling, coined first to describe
women’s hardships in getting promotions in corporate America. Although this
concept is well recognized among the Chinese women scientists and engineers that
I studied, they were shocked when I presented the data above to them. In fact, the
most surprised group was the younger women, the doctoral students and postdocs.
The women who had at least a few years of experience in the industry or government
laboratories did not seem to be surprised. They laughed when they saw the data and
said that they knew such phenomenon existed as they had experienced it at work but
“could not put a finger on it.”
Some argue that the aspects of Asian culture reflecting modesty, diligence, letting
work speak for itself, and collectivism are the backbones of the Chinese science and
engineering workforce in the U.S. As Varma pointed out:
Their low-key, self-effacing, and team approach works against them in
American science and engineering organizations which reward aggressive,
assertive, and outspoken individuals. Even when Asian immigrant scientists
and engineers acknowledge their unfair treatments, they still avoid conflict
with those in a higher position.9
The self-promoting and loud demeanor of their American colleagues was
discussed whenever a group of Chinese scientists and engineers met. Many new
doctoral students from China were shocked by how aggressive their American
fellow doctoral students were. They often felt that their ideas and voices were not
heard by either their peers or their advisers.

DISCIPLINARY DIFFERENCES

Disciplinary differences were revealed when it came to common career moves

upon the completion of doctoral programs for students in physical sciences and
engineering. Participating women physical sciences students discussed the

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necessity of obtaining postdoctoral positions before graduation. They reported that

it was fairly common for physical sciences doctoral graduates to do two or even
three postdoctoral assignments before landing their permanent jobs as scientific
researchers or assistant professors. The quality and reputation of the research teams
that they were teamed with during postdoctoral work were extremely crucial.
The ones who failed to work with renowned research groups in their fields ended
up being in a “limbo” stage where they keep doing more and more postdoctoral
assignments, but usually could not find permanent jobs.
In contrast, student interviewees from engineering departments hardly discussed
the practice of being a postdoctoral researcher. They did mention their interactions
with the ones that they were working with currently. However, most of them were
focused on an industry career, which would not require them to have any postdoctoral
working experience.
Some women shared their observations about how some of their previous peers
who had graduated were able to obtain assistant professor positions right after
graduate school. Compared to women student participants in engineering, participants
in the physical sciences were discovered to be less likely to have industry options.
For the ones who decided not to pursue academic careers, the option of joining
governmental laboratories was quite limited. As a result, many decided to enter the
financial and actuarial industries.

GENDERED COMMUNICATIONS

Women faculty and doctoral students participating in this study reported fairly
different views on students’ career trajectories, revealing a significant communication
gap. Women students shared their difficulties in communicating with their advisers
regarding career-related questions. Many of them, in fact, made a decision not
to pursue academic careers before even having a career-related discussion with
their advisers. Over half of the women interviewed had never had a career-related
conversation with their advisers. The ones who had such conversations only reported
having it during their last year of doctoral studies. Almost all of the students
interviewed agreed they wished they could have had such conversations earlier with
their advisers in order to be better prepared for the competitive job market. Yet, such
a practice turned out to be extremely rare.
Women faculty participants were not at ease with this kind of phenomenon.
They reported that they avoided bringing up the topic of career aspirations unless
students initiated such conversations. Many professor participants felt that they were
perceived as only wanting to push their doctoral students into academic positions
upon graduation, that they would not be able to offer objective advice on other
career possibilities. Only women professors who had been in their positions for less
than 10 years had such concerns. They were more likely to be pursued by women
doctoral students in their departments and asked work-life balance related questions
compared to their older counterparts.

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Not surprisingly, one of the main reasons given by the women doctoral students
in this study for avoiding an academic career path was their concern regarding
work-life balance. All but one participant discussed the desire to start a family, have
a stable income, and raise children. Yet, they all perceived academic careers to be
the least friendly towards this kind of practice. They compared the options of going
into industry, governmental research laboratories, or even finance, and concluded
that governmental labs and industry were more likely to provide them with five-
day-a-week jobs and plenty of free time to spend with their significant others and
children.
Several women faculty stated the problem of “implicit bias” in their departments,
which is created by male faculty members when women face childcare responsibilities.
Yet, they decided to not reveal this phenomenon to their female students. All women
faculty in this study acknowledged that the climate for women in physical sciences
and engineering has been improving for the past two decades and they expect more
positive changes in the fields towards women in the future.
On the opposite side, the male professors I had discussions with did not discuss
their strategies to mentor women doctoral students to prepare them for academic
careers. Several male professors regarded “having a family and children” to be a
“100 percent distraction” for women doctoral students and believed that they could
not achieve as much as they would have if they started a family, at least before their
careers were firmly established.
Another significant reason for women to withdraw from the option of academic
careers was the pressure to secure extramural funding. Over 80 percent of the
women in this study cited the need to secure external funding to support doctoral
students and maintain their laboratories and research equipment to be the number
one reason for not pursuing academic careers. Closely associated with the ability
to secure funding, many students also discussed their concerns that their limited
English skills may hinder them from crafting successful funding applications. All
of the Chinese women discussed the experience of having their ideas stolen by their
American colleagues and presented as their own in funding applications.

INFORMAL YET STRONG TRANSNATIONAL TIES: FAMILY AND

ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIPS

In Geddie’s 2013 study of highly skilled transnational migrants in Canada and

England, she confirmed Basch et al.’s theory that multi-stranded social relations
were a critical part of studying highly educated migrants’ daily experiences, cultural
practices, and career advancement/challenges.10 One of the strong cultural and
socioeconomic connections that Chinese women scientists and engineers have is
with their families in China. I found that these strong transnational ties significantly
influenced their career decisions. Waters suggested that examining the transnational
relationships that international students have is crucial in understanding this group
of students’ experiences, needs, and migration strategies.11 In my study I found that

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the career advancement and mobility decisions of these women were strongly related
to the non-work related facets of their lives.
Socioeconomically, none of the women I studied came from privileged families
in China. Many of them were considered as tian cai (天才), or genius of the
family, by their local communities. Due to the one-child policy in China, most of
the women scientists and engineers I studied under the age of 35 had no siblings.12
The traditional Confucian family relations of si shi tong tang (四世同堂), or four
generations living under the same roof, has been severely challenged and altered
due to this policy and the increasing mobility of younger Chinese generations
(especially for women). Consistent with Bourdieu’s social capital theory, many
Chinese families regard sending their children abroad to pursue graduate studies as a
key strategy for socioeconomic advancement.13 This kind of social mobility has been
well documented by many migration studies scholars.14
However, doubts and reservations about sending young women to a distant land
trouble many Chinese families. A Chinese woman engineer shared, “My dad was
very hesitant to let me go as he was worried that I would never be able to find a
husband and settle down. He is also concerned about my safety as I am a girl.”
This research participant’s experience reflects a large number of Chinese women’s
voices in this study. They struggled with delayed financial independence due to their
graduate study in the U.S.; they were caught in the middle of two cultures that had
many biases about each other; and they had to constantly reassure their parents that
they would not be separated from them for a long time.
Meanwhile, the exposure of feminist studies of science and engineering has made
them question the traditional gender and social norms casted by Chinese culture.
These debates generated some interesting conversations among the Chinese women
scientists and engineers I studied. A few of them challenged the reasons why they
were expected to get married by 27, shoulder the burdens of following their spouses’
career paths, and be xiao shun (孝顺), or filial piety for both sets of parents (their
own and their spouses).
Whenever this kind of gender specific discussions came up, it was fascinating that
the group would be clearly divided into two sides. The smaller group would bravely
voice their opinions. Another group would strongly disagree with this assumption,
but would not publicly share their doubts regarding some sexist aspects of Chinese
culture. In the Chinese group, publicly voicing opinion regarding gender roles and
stigma would be considered as too xi fang hua (西方化), or westernized, which
somehow had negative connotations within this group and was interpreted as less
patriotic.
Although it plays a key role in one’s career decision-making process, personal
relationship status was only discussed within the very inner circles of women
scientists and engineers. Even after spending many years with this group of women,
I often found out about their personal relationships after they set a date for their
wedding, except for couples who worked in the same university. They usually
socialized with other married Chinese couples.

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Interracial relationships were rarely seen in the Chinese women scientists and
engineers group, and were not always perceived positively. Whenever a new interracial
relationship emerged it suddenly became a subject of considerable discussion within
the community. When I asked some women engineers about the reason, they would
give me a strange look (due to my ethnicity), then explain that many of them would
be concerned over what their parents back in China would think of their life choice.
It would evoke further conflicts with their families over cultural adaptation (would
she be happy marrying to someone who is not from the same cultural backgrounds),
career mobility (based on the assumption that their American partners were not going
to move to China), and childrearing responsibilities and styles.
Participation in informal social activities was largely limited by national
boundaries for Chinese scientists and engineers. Nearly all of the self-organized
social gatherings included only other Chinese scientists and engineers. Occasionally,
some Chinese women doctoral students would participate in their labmates’ or other
colleagues’ birthdays or other social events, but they instantly became a talking point
within the Chinese community of scientists and engineers.
Personal life, especially dating, was very rarely discussed among the Chinese
scientist and engineers group; unless the boyfriends were non-Chinese. This
is another way for some scientists to expand their networks and it holds true for
both men and women. Usually only one or two of the woman scientists’ guimi
(闺密), or best friend, or those who had known them for a long time would know
about it. So it was quite common for me to be invited to a wedding without knowing
that the bride and groom had been dating for the past five years. An interesting fact
is that many American scientists and engineers considered Chinese women scientists
to be introverted and not social. In fact, they often have very elaborate networks of
friends, but mostly Chinese ones.
It became particularly interesting when someone decided to date a non-Chinese
scientist or engineer. The wife of a Chinese engineer told me that many people in
the community were still traditional when it came to choosing spouses and that they
thought that the Chinese women scientists or engineers who dated outside of their
race were too liberal to be trusted. Somehow, women’s dating preferences came
under scrutiny not only by their women peers but also by male members in the larger
Chinese community.
The women scientists and engineers who were engaged to or dating other
scientists  or engineers were almost always facing dual career decision-making
challenges. The standard approach was for both partners to apply for as many jobs
as they could in both academia and the private sector, then compare the offers before
making their final decisions. In the majority of these cases, Chinese women nearly
always followed their husband’s career path and moved with him.
A difficult conversation may arise if the woman’s job offer appeared to be more
appealing than her boyfriend/husband’s. A space physicist who decided to completely
give up her previous research projects to follow her fiancé to a city in the Midwest
expressed some level of regret to me. She stated:

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My friends all think that I am giving up my career and I think that’s a bad
way of phrasing it. It feels like we are the people to blame. Instead of blaming
the women, why can’t we interpret my choice in a different way, like I am
switching to a different career path maybe? After all, what I learned in graduate
school was transferable in many industries.
The influential French philosopher Michel Foucault theorized about the
relationships between power and knowledge. He argued that knowledge links to
power and is deeply diffused and imbedded in linguistic discourses.15 Perhaps we
could stop conceptualizing Chinese women scientists and engineers as the victims
of traditional Chinese male-centric social norms when it comes to choosing their
academic paths? Is it possible that these women were making completely informed,
rational, and culture-free decisions based on what they wanted as individuals? After
many years of debating, I still do not have the answer to this question. I think the
answer is not simple and requires further study of this community of women.

RESEARCH AND INDUSTRY COLLABORATIONS

All of the Chinese women I studied were part of research collaborations. But their
roles were generally limited to literature review and data collection. The nature of
their work remained basic, primarily involving infrastructure and administrative
aspects of the projects. This pattern was consistent across women scientists and
engineers of all ranks, from second-year doctoral students to seasoned professionals
who had over 20 years under their belts.
The large picture was rarely presented to these women, who were often expected
to attend to administrative details and leave the men free to deal with more “complex”
issues. They were assigned to and were used to focus on one task at a time and not
expected to be interested in the larger implications of the research. Chinese women
were rarely in direct contact with research collaborators and funding officers, with
others or even among themselves.
Traditionally, researchers and scholars acquire, transmit, and disseminate
information through formal education activities and processes.16 Many sociological
and anthropological studies have revealed that one of the key vehicles to transmit
scientific knowledge within the science and engineering communities is through
informal and transnational networks.17 Bozeman and Corley studied over 400
scientists and engineers at universities and research centers in the U.S. and found
that human capital and social capital were intricately intertwined in science and
engineering collaborations and innovations.18 Merely studying co-authorship
and collaborative patents is not sufficient to cover the wide scope of research
collaborations.
Not surprisingly, the findings from Bozeman and Corley’s study showed little
progress has been made in changing women’s role in transnational collaborations.
Women were rarely included in large-scale transnational science and engineering

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projects. When they were, they were rarely in the role of principal investigators
(PI), project leader, or project manager. Their communications with their transitional
counterparts were very limited. Most presentations were done by men, most
executive decisions were made by men, and women’s voices were rarely heard by
the community and funding agencies. Additionally, out of the 460 scientists and
engineers studied, the sample size for minority women was so small that Bozeman
and Corley honestly pointed out that even though the group would be interesting to
study, no conclusions could be drawn based on such a small sample size.

MARGINALIZATION AND TACIT KNOWLEDGE

Formalized mentoring experiences between American advisers and Chinese women

students in physical sciences and engineer programs were limited to advising on
research projects and dissertation research. Career development-related mentoring
was rarely observed. Often times, these women students had to reach out to their own
limited networks at other institutions or companies to explore career opportunities.
None of the women in this study had found jobs through their doctoral advisers’
contacts. Thus, the entire process of career mentoring and professional development
appeared to be missing when it came to Chinese women doctoral students in science
and engineering programs.
It was quite common for these women to be only three months from graduating
from their PhD programs and still without a single conversation about career
preparation with their advisers. A lot of women would try to find additional
resources through the knowledge they learned from their Chinese peers at the same
institutions. For example, a space physicist told me that she was too scared to
have a career conversation with her adviser. She was concerned that her adviser
would not consider her as a “real scientist” if she brought up the topic. Instead, she
learned from a more senior Chinese scientist in the same field that statistics classes
would be useful in finding jobs. So this doctoral student started taking additional
statistics classes while working on her dissertation. She ended up leaving her field
of space physics and taking a data analyst job. This job used the knowledge from
her three months of statistics classes instead of that from her six years of doctoral
study.
Facing these mentoring challenges, most of the Chinese women scientists and
engineers developed their own circles and strategies to disseminate tacit knowledge
about the discipline, department, programs, and potential employers through a
strong network of Chinese women.19 I was told that the very first thing that every
new Chinese woman student was warned about after they became a member of this
informal circle was which senior male professors/researchers had a history of sexual
harassment behaviors. Over the course of five years, this group of women developed
a “science and engineering pervert list” as they called it. One woman told me that
“there is not much we can do to prevent this from happening or report any incidents.
So we try our best to inform our comrades to make them stay away from those guys.”

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Several members of this science and engineering circle mentioned that they
primarily developed different hei ming dan (黑名单), or blacklists. These lists
covered a wide range of organizational knowledge, from who should never be put
on a dissertation committee, to those one should never talk to, to which professors
had revoked their international students’ visa sponsorships, etc.
These lists and the tacit knowledge tended to be extremely helpful to Chinese
women scientists and engineers, who constantly lived in the margins. I believe their
situations made them more aware of the power of tacit knowledge and the solutions
that it could provide them to cope with their daily challenges. Among the members
of these inner circles and Chinese women networks, the importance of the role
postdoctoral fellows and researchers played in disseminating this kind of critical
knowledge cannot be underestimated.
In certain departments, such as space sciences and space physics, there were
tenure-track professional researchers dedicated to writing NASA grant proposals
and collaborating with researchers from national labs and the industry, sometimes
including doctoral students, to carry out effective research for NASA missions. These
researchers were described by many participants as “extremely helpful mentors”
for professional development processes in graduate school. Many women expressed
their preference for interacting with these postdoctoral fellows and researchers
due to the following reasons: “They just graduated from their doctoral program
and are in the same age group with us,” “they understand our pain and are more
understanding,” or “we don’t have to be scared of asking stupid questions.”

FURTHER RESEARCH

In the dispersion of the Chinese knowledge diaspora, universities around the world,
especially in the U.S., are serving as the main vessels for talent and knowledge
innovation to flow through and circulate. Universities as transnational platforms
for knowledge diaspora work are essential organizations that create, transmit,
reproduce, and receive cultural messages or practices that support mobility and the
deployment of cultural power.20 To many science and engineering undergraduate
students studying at top-ranked Chinese universities, their American dream starts
with pursuing a doctoral degree at a prestigious U.S. institution. Studying in the U.S.
not only represents one step closer to prestige and high status, it also symbolizes
westernization and modernization, which are regarded highly by many Chinese.
The NSF’s data reflects this strong immigration trend. In 2011, of approximately
38,000 PhD students graduating from science and engineering programs, more
than 3,000 (8 percent) were Chinese nationals. Among these Chinese doctorates,
most came from a handful of prestigious universities in China. For instance, Mervis
reported that a large number of the PhD graduates in the year 2000 received their
undergraduate degrees from Tsinghua University or Peking University.21 Studying
feeder institutions in China could paint a fuller picture of the Chinese science

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and engineering graduate students in the U.S. and help us to better understand the
networks and strategies they adopt in their transnational scientific endeavors.
In a quantitative study of over 16,000 PhD graduates in American chemistry
departments, Gaule and Piacentini found that Chinese students (F-1 visa holders)
had a substantially higher scientific output in producing publications during their
doctoral work than their American and other international counterparts.22 Chinese
students’ contributions to the U.S. are no longer limited to foreign student fees but
more importantly come through their intellectual innovations and technological
achievements.23
Another area of research should focus on Chinese-born women scientists and
engineers in academia. As I suggested in an earlier chapter, the NSF ADVANCE
program has largely overlooked this population in institutionalized efforts aimed at
improving and enhancing women and minorities’ experiences in academic science
and engineering. More studies about immigrant women academics’ education
experiences, collaborations, and challenges are needed beyond the Chinese
community.
Last but not least, the findings from this study revealed the existence of culturally-
based communication styles among scientists and engineers. The intersection of
these styles with gender have made some scientific collaboration and knowledge
production processes challenging. Research in the near future should analyze the
culturally-based research patterns in the scientific community and shed light on
some commonly misunderstood social and cultural situations.

NOTES
1
“Xi Jinping and the Chinese Dream,” The Economist, May 4, 2013, http://www.economist.com/news/
leaders/21577070-vision-chinas-new-president-should-serve-his-people-not-nationalist-state-xi-
jinping (accessed August 19, 2015).
2
U.S. Census Bureau, The Foreign Born from Asia, 2011, American Community Survey Briefs
(Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau, 2011).
3
National Science Foundation, “Science and Engineering Indicator: 2014.”
4
Varma, “High-Tech Coolies,” 338.
5
National Science Foundation, “Science and Engineering Indicator,” 2014.
6
M. Locke, “Some Asians Leaving Labs, Fewer Coming,” Asian Week 21, no. 30 (2000): 3–5.
7
Saxenian, Silicon Valley’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs.
8
Joyce Tang, Doing Engineering: The Career Attainment and Mobility of Caucasian, Black, and Asian-
American Engineers (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).
9
Varma, “High-Tech Coolies,” 349.
10
Geddie, “The Transnational Ties That Bind”; Linda G. Basch, Cristina Blanc-Szanton, Nina
Glick Schiller, and Workshop on Developing a Transnational Perspective on Migration, Towards
a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered
(New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1992).
11
Johanna L. Waters, “In Pursuit of Scarcity: Transnational Students, ‘Employability’, and the MBA,”
Environment and Planning A 41, no. 8 (2009): 1865–1883.
12
The one-child policy was introduced in 1978 and implemented in the fall of 1980 with the purpose of
alleviating social, economic, and environmental problems in China. In 2007, 35 percent of China’s

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population was subject to a strict one-child restriction, but there were many exceptions. For example,
ethnic minority families could have more than one child as could families where the parents were
themselves from one-child families. The general Chinese population has been accepting of such a
policy, yet it has been the center of criticism from human rights groups outside of China. In late
2015, the Chinese government ended its one-child policy, allowing families to have two children. This
policy has had a significant effect on women’s education in China, since in those families where the
only child is a daughter all resources are devoted to educating her; this is a major change in China,
where limited monies for education had always been focused on the sons.
13
Bourdieu, “L’illusion Biographique.”
14
Brenda Yeoh and Shirlena Huang, eds., Cultural Politics Talent Migration East Asia (Abingdon:
Routledge, 2013); Geddie, “The Transnational Ties That Bind.”
15
Michel Foucault, Power Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1980).
16
Barry Bozeman and Elizabeth Corley, “Scientists’ Collaboration Strategies: Implications for Scientific
and Technical Human Capital,” Research Policy 33, no. 4 (2004): 599–616.
17
Paul Nelson, “New Agendas and New Patterns of International NGO Political Action,” Voluntas:
International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations 13, no. 4 (2002): 377–392; Traweek,
Beamtimes and Lifetimes.
18
Bozeman and Corley, “Scientists’ Collaboration Strategies.”
19
The notion of tacit knowledge was first introduced to philosophy by Michael Polanyi in his work
Personal Knowledge. He stated that people know more than they can articulate to others and can only
be transmitted through practice through social networks. See Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge:
Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
20
Rui Yang and Anthony R. Welch, “Globalisation, Transnational Academic Mobility and the Chinese
Knowledge Diaspora: An Australian Case Study,” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of
Education 31, no. 5 (2010): 595.
21
Jeffrey Mervis, “Top PhD Feeder Schools Are Now Chinese,” Science, July 11, 2008, 185.
22
Patrick Gaulé and Mario Piacentini, “Chinese Graduate Students and U.S. Scientific Productivity,”
Review of Economics and Statistics 95, no. 2 (2012): 698–701.
23
Stephan Vincent-Lancrin, “What is the Impact of Demography on Higher Education Systems? A
Forward-Looking Approach for OECD Countries,” in Higher Education to 2030, ed. Organisation
for Economic Co-operation and Development (Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development, 2008): 41–103.

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IDENTITY TRANSFORMATION
Chinese Feminist Perspectives

The first job of an ethnographer is to engage in a willing suspension of belief

in the subjects’ common sense world. We may be able to accept that suspension
easily when the anthropologist is describing some “primitive” people in an
“exotic” setting or some “backward culture,” remote from our world view. Our
facile acceptance of the ethnographer’s suspension of belief in the world view
of hers in those cases can conceal simple, perhaps unconscious, condescension.
When the ethnographer brings this same analytic distance to the study of our
own society, it can be very disturbing. The “common sense” of our world is
buttressed by a profound belief that it is “scientific,” which means that it is
“true.” Or as the physicists whose sense of certainty about this world view I
have been studying would say, “it must be true because it works.”1
– Sharon Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes:
The World of High Energy Physicists
I want to end this study by provoking readers’ thoughts through the lens of Chinese
feminism. I do so for a number of reasons. First, this book intends to bring attention
to a group of Chinese immigrant women scientists and engineers who have been
overlooked despite the increasingly significant roles they play in the transnational
science and engineering communities. Second, this book challenges the hegemonic
assumption that Chinese women are all alike, and thus that the kinds of challenges
they are facing in the U.S. are always the same. Third, I intend to use the perspective
of Chinese feminism and suggest new ways for researchers to challenge the “right
way” to study this overlooked group of highly educated and accomplished women.

POSTCOLONIAL FEMINISM AND WOMEN OF COLOR

As Harding pointed out in Sciences from Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialitites, and

Modernities, one of the major reasons for developing feminist standpoint theory is
to provide effective methodologies for studies that can produce knowledge that is
“for women, not just about them.”2 Standpoint theory has evolved since its creation
to incorporate multiple positionalities of women from various racial, class, social
relation, and national origins.3
The projects for this chapter are threefold: First, highlight implications for this
study from some prominent women of color feminists – especially bell hooks and

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Chela Sandoval.4 Their work reveals the importance of calls for utilizing non-Euro-
American feminist theories and methodologies to examine the lived experiences
of women of color. Second, it introduces key Chinese feminist scholars’ work on
the history and tradition of Chinese feminism and Chinese women’s survival and
coping strategies in traditionally male-centric, class-centric, and power-centric
Chinese societal and academic cultures.5 Last but not least, I propose a new
framework utilizing a combination of global and local or “glocalized” Chinese
feminist perspectives to illuminate Chinese-born U.S.-educated women scientists’
and engineers’ lived experiences, oppression, challenges, and social relations in their
career endeavors in American higher education institutions.
First, I want to comment on the use of dualistic terms to describe countries and
people from different parts of the world. I am referring to such terms as “first world/
third world,” “developed/underdeveloped,” “haves/have nots,” and “west/orient.”
These are the older terms used in the aftermath of many centuries of European and
North American colonialism, imperialism, and capitalist invasion. During the 1990s,
the United Nations began to popularize the terms “north/south” as substitutes. But all of
these are oversimplifications that create false perceptions and misconceptions, and do
not accurately reflect modern national realities, and especially not those of individuals.
These terms are still often used by American scientists and engineers when it
comes to discussions of diverse cultural practices in science and engineering, often
unaware of the fact these terms are now out of date. Sometimes they are used in
derogatory ways by Euro-American male scientists and engineers to show their
belief that women from “underdeveloped worlds” could not make it to top positions
in “developed worlds” due to biological, historical, and cultural reasons.
In Science from Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialitites, and Modernities,
Harding suggested that current studies of the intersectionality thesis of women in
non-European and North American countries should avoid overgeneralization of
women’s lives and especially the use of any dualisms, the division of people into
two groups of any kind, including the terms mentioned above, but also others, such
as racial or gender differences. Harding elaborated:
No such contrast is entirely accurate and most carry regressive political
meanings. Moreover, any such contrast inaccurately homogenizes the two
groups and obscures more complex social relations between and among
various global groupings … Another problem is that such contrasts reify a
preoccupation with differences that hides shared interests between peoples in
very different social circumstances. Yet it would be premature to avoid all
such binaries and thereby make invisible global patterns which create radically
different life conditions for people who happen to be born into one society
rather than another, or into one family rather than another in any given society.
Similarly, one can’t make male supremacy go away by refusing to indicate
which are the women and which the men, or dissolve exploitative class
relations by refusing to recognize which people are poor and which are rich.6

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In today’s world, Chinese women do not share a single standpoint when it comes
to their experiences and struggles. While the nationality of the women scientists and
engineers was a controlled variable, it should not be the only factor we examine
when it comes to a woman’s experiences in science and engineering fields in the
U.S. We should also examine their socioeconomic class and background. We should
ask questions such as: What kind of ethnic group do they belong to in China’s
culturally diverse ethnic categories?7 What part of China are they from? What were
their previous interactions with non-Chinese students and researchers? What kind
of social relations do they have in their new environment (in the U.S.) and old
environment (in China)? What is their family history and connection to the fields of
science and engineering? Researchers need to consider all of these factors in order to
fully understand and analyze any particular group of Chinese women’s knowledge,
experiences, interactions, and social relations.
Through these critical questions, this project started off studying a group of
Chinese women scientists’ and engineers’ daily interactions, research activities,
informal gatherings, household responsibilities, and professional and personal
networks. But not all Chinese women migrants share the same experiences and not
all women scientists and engineers share similar experiences. I am hoping that the
multi-dimensional viewpoints emerging through this presentation of their diverse
professional and personal activities could help foster a paradigm shift in studies of
Chinese women in a foreign context.
Many American scholars have devoted their work to shifting the theoretical
frameworks for studying “third world women” in the U.S in different disciplinary
contexts. Chela Sandoval pointed out that hegemonic feminism cannot be the whole
answer to studying women of color, as it does not acknowledge the full picture.8 In
the book Methodology of the Oppressed, Sandoval encouraged women of color to
use oppositional consciousness when it comes to studying their own lives, as this
standpoint challenges the theories and methods proposed by hegemonic Euro-Anglo
American feminism.9 Sandoval pointed out that this perspective is a starting point to
call for a mixture or collaboration of ideas, knowledge, and theories.
This kind of viewpoint ensures the capture of all aspects of reality experienced
by “minorities” in a dominant society. Her hope is that such a kind of consciousness
can be recognized by scholars in different fields who are all trying reach the same
goal. The idea is that under racial, class, ethnic, gender and political dominance,
women of color have been excluded from legitimized social narratives and so, in
their process of surviving, have been forced to develop coping strategies to navigate
dominant cultures, consciousness, and organizational habits.
This project captured each Chinese woman’s voice and experience from the
angles of cultural socialization, graduate education, national culture, migration,
and professional and social networks. Each story, scenario, and incident shared in
this book reflects different Chinese women’s insights, experience, and struggles in
the U.S. science and engineering world. I hope that these detailed descriptions and
analyses of Chinese women’s lived experiences in the U.S. will shed some light on

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the ways that scholars study the Chinese scientific community and the ways that
U.S. institutions interact with it, as well as promote mutual understanding between
the Chinese science and engineering community in the U.S. and their counterparts
in China.

INTERSECTIONALITY AND FEMINIST THEORY

Intersectionality theory was formally introduced into feminist studies by Professor

Kimberlé Crenshaw during the 1980s, when she began to incorporate it into feminist
studies. Intersectionality refers to the studies of how different power structures
interact and affect the lives of minorities, specifically women of color.10 Although
Crenshaw’s focus on the theory was on how law responded to issues that relate to
gender and race discrimination, the use of intersectionality illuminated the following
decades of gender and race studies scholars. Kimberlé Crenshaw encouraged social
science and legal scholars to examine race through a gender lens, and feminist
studies through a lens that looked at race.
Crenshaw commented on the famous case of Degraffenried vs. General Motors,
where five Black women sued GM for gender and race discrimination. The law
was not initially there for their defense. Why? Because anti-discrimination laws
separated gender and race, and insisted they be treated as separate issues.11 There
were Black employees at GM who were not discriminated against and other women
GM employees who were treated fairly; thus, the initial anti-discrimination law
indicated that these five women did not have a case. It was very difficult to establish
a legal framework under which they could sue as Black women, viewing both race
and gender as factors in their discrimination cases. How can we study them if we
are limited to a single perspective that does not take into account the totality of their
situation and experiences?
This theory enlightens the study of Chinese women in the U.S. Institutional
policies and resources, especially legal ones, are rarely in place to protect and advance
Chinese women when they are challenged, treated unfairly, and discriminated
against, or are harassed on a continuous basis. Thus, the communities formed by
Chinese women scientists and engineers became a major driving force in helping
immigrant Chinese women in science and engineering survive in the margins and
work extra hard to reach the unreachable glass ceiling. As one senior Chinese space
physicist joked, “What glass ceiling? We try so hard in our entire career and don’t
even think we got anywhere close to this glass ceiling that everyone is talking
about.”
In Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, bell hooks argued that feminists
should consider gender in close relation to race, ethnicity, and class. She also
called for an in-depth analysis of the cultural framework of power. Part of bell
hooks’s restructuring idea is to engage men into the feminist movement instead of
positioning men into a completely separate or even hostile group. The transnational
networks of Chinese scientists and engineers consist of both women and men.

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Studying the culture and behaviors of such a circle under one national culture
requires the perspectives of both genders and of the interactions occurring between
them every day.
However, although a good number of the male scientists played key mentoring
roles in these Chinese women’s educational and career experiences in the U.S., these
male scientists were usually turned off by the feminist discussions in science and
engineering, especially in the Chinese context. This avoidance of discussion could
be attributable to two reasons. First, feminism and Marxism were two propaganda
machines used by the Chinese government during the Cultural Revolution. Many
senior Chinese scientists and engineers were negatively impacted by the political
turmoil during this period and thus were not willing to recall or revisit such
history. Second, many Chinese male scientists and engineers had only a very basic
understanding of feminism and thus had the misconception that feminists were “bra-
burners” and “man-haters.”12
Women from outside Europe and North America are not a monolithic group; not
by any means.13 As Mohanty pointed out in Third World Feminism and Contextual
Analysis:
What is problematic about this kind of use of “women” as a group, as a
stable category of analysis, is that it assumes an ahistorical, universal unity
between women based on a generalized notion of their subordination. Instead
of analytically demonstrating the production of women as socioeconomic
political groups within particular local contexts, this analytical move limits the
definition of the female subject to gender identity, completely bypassing social
class and ethnic identities.14
Mohanty further suggested that a powerful feminist analysis of women from non-
European and non-North American countries should incorporate a detailed analysis
of the particular group of women’s social, cultural, local, and political environments.
Perhaps researchers of Chinese women could learn some useful analytic
principles for studying women from Mies’ study of the lacemakers in India.15 Using
a feminist theory to frame her study, Mies provided detailed analysis of the lace
industry in India, its effect on international markets, lace production processes and
relationships, the division of labor, and the notion of housewives and spare time
activities. Gender power dynamics and gender-based economic exploitation were
also described. The detailed description and analysis have painted a vivid picture of
the living and working conditions of these lace-making women and the challenges
posed by social, political, and cultural beliefs on this group of women.

HISTORY AND CURRENT DISCOURSES OF CHINESE FEMINISM

Although the Chinese feminism discourse began during the early 1900s, the early
writings of Chinese feminists were unavailable to the English-speaking world until
recently when a group of China studies scholars published The Birth of Chinese

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Feminism.16 Here there is space only for a brief review of the main Chinese feminists
and their work.

He-Yin Zhen

One of the first Chinese women to openly challenge views on women’s place in
society and encourage women to fight back was anarcho-feminist He-Yin Zhen
(何银珍) (1824–1920). Born and raised in an affluent family, she was educated in
Confucian schools despite being a woman in the late 1800s. Throughout her life,
He-Yin Zhen actively promoted the liberation of women. She believed that the
society could not be free without the liberation of women.
Among her other accomplishments, she created Tian Yee (or Tianyi Bao) when
she was in exile in Japan. This was one of the earliest anarchist feminist journals,
which published many pieces of both original and translated texts regarding
women’s liberation and rights in Asia as well as analyses of Chinese political and
socioeconomic contexts from feminist perspectives during the era. More importantly,
the earliest Chinese translation of the Communist Manifesto was published in this
journal in 1908.17 This rarely known fact is politically and historically significant: “It
was Chinese feminism that first translated communist thought, among other radical
ideas, and introduced it to China (by way of Japan), not the converse.”18

Figure 10. The only available image of He-Yin Zhen, possibly

taken when she was in exile in Japan.19

He-Yin Zhen’s early work emphasized that “woman” was a transhistorical

global category. It was not a biological identity but rather a socially and historically
constructed identity. Historically and culturally, Chinese women’s identities were
structured under the heavy influence of unequal and unfair laws, rituals, traditions,

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and cultures that favored men. He-Yin Zhen wrote numerous articles in various
publications, helping Chinese women to see such a sexist reality.
Prominent Chinese feminist scholars have emphasized the importance of the phase
nannü (男女), which indicates the socially and culturally constructed gender terms
“men and women.”20 This is one of the most critical concepts in twentieth century
Chinese feminism. The slogan for the first wave of Chinese feminist movement was
nannü pingdeng (男女平等), or gender equality. Early Chinese feminist theorists and
pioneers such as Jin Tianhe (1873–1947) and Liang Qichao (1873–1929) advocated
for equal access to education, equal opportunities to apply for jobs, and equal legal
rights, and also first introduced Euro-American feminism into China.
He-Yin Zhen also refused to treat the Marxist concept of class separately from
gender. She suggested that feminists should approach nannü with the concept of jieji
(阶级), or social class, in mind. This was an early Chinese feminist expression of the
intersectionality of gender and socioeconomic status.

Chinese Women’s Movement

The first real wave of feminism in China began towards the end of the nineteenth
century, around the time of Reform Movement of 1889, and grew rapidly as the
country entered the twentieth century. The first wave of the women’s movement
promoted the establishment of feminist groups in order to achieve the ultimate
freedom from one’s family and the patriarchal organizations. Between 1901 and
1911, over several dozen women’s organizations and groups were formed and started
their movement, using various methods.21
First, they published articles, pamphlets, papers, and other reading materials to
promote women’s rights, transmitting the knowledge of women’s liberation, and
expressing women’s own demands to society. Many of the feminist publications were
founded by women students who returned to China from study in Japan, which was
rapidly modernizing at the time. Some of the publications achieved great popularity.
For example, Zhongguo Xinnujie Zazhi (New Chinese Women’s Magazine), which
was founded in Japan and first started publishing in 1907, had a circulation of over
five thousand copies per issue.
Figure 11 is the cover of Funü Shibao (妇女时报), which was China’s first
commercial women’s journal. It was distributed in all of the major cities and over
ten provinces. It was one of the most influential women’s magazines during the early
1900s and made critical contributions to emerging discussions regarding women’s
education, equal rights, and democracy.
In addition, the early Chinese feminists campaigned vigorously against the
ancient practice of footbinding. They also established many schools for women.
These movements targeted the old Confucian concept nüzi wucai bian shi de
(女子无才便是德), or women who have no talent are virtuous, and started to
at least plant the seeds in women’s minds of the possibility of destroying many

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Figure 11. Cover of Funü Shibao (Women’s Eastern Times) Issue No. 2 (26 July, 1911).22

harmful patriarchal traditions. The first schools for women were established with
both private and public support. By 1910, there were over 300 schools exclusively
for women. This number was unprecedented. By the early 1920s, some women
even began to study abroad.23
The May Fourth Movement, discussed earlier in this book, was one of
the most influential and profound political and feminist youth movements in
twentieth century China. It not only profoundly challenged and overthrew many
Confucian ethical codes and feudal traditions, but also created unstoppable
momentum for the women’s movement during the 1920s and 1930s.
Women students were kept away from the protests of the May Fourth Movement.
Two weeks after the outbreak, however, a woman Beijing primary school teacher

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wrote a letter to the president of Peking University, Cai Yuanpei, requesting that
Peking University lift the ban on enrolling women students.24 In early 1920, with
Cai Yuanpei’s and other professors’ support, Peking University allowed several
women students to audit their classes. Two years later, several other universities
along with Peking University began to formally enroll women students. By the
end of that year, over 800 women students were enrolled in universities.25 This
was a major milestone in women’s education.
Following the momentum of the May Fourth Movement, Chinese society started
to abandon old Confucian ethical codes whose purpose was to not only separate
women from men but also to isolate women from society. First, the old naming
tradition that showed clear gender differences was abandoned; then the discussion of
hun yin zi you (婚姻自由), or freedom of marriage, became mainstream and young
people began to choose their own romantic partners, breaking away from the tradition
of arranged marriage that had dominated China for thousands of years.26 By the
1930s, women were widely participating in all kinds of jobs that had not previously
been available to them and were beginning to acquire the right to participate in the
political arena. The influence of the May Fourth Movement on Chinese feminism
and Chinese women’s liberation was profound.
The next wave of influential movement was called the “Seventeen-Year Period.”
This period began around the time when the People’s Republic of China was
established in 1949 and ended around the beginning of the Cultural Revolution
in 1966. The significance of this seventeen-year period is that socialist orders,
ideologies, and formal institutions to implement them were established during this
time.27 The focus during this period was on the industrialization of China, to be
achieved at all costs. Figure 12 shows a Chinese woman construction engineer in a
poster from this period.
The most significant development regarding Chinese women’s liberation during
the seventeen-year period was the establishment of the All-China Democratic
Women’s Federation. It was China’s first nationwide women’s organization with
the goal of promoting gender equality. It started as a non-politically affiliated
organization with centralized management and many regional chapters. Its mission
was to help promote the status of women and simultaneously help build a socialist
China. In the 1950s, the federation was officially incorporated into the administrative
structure of the Communist Party of China and changed its name to All-China
Women’s Federation (ACWF).
The ACWF was started by the Communist Party as a tool to mobilize women
for political, ideological, and economic motives. However, ACWF’s role in
advancing women’s equality in China should not be underestimated. In addition to
educating women on topics of domestic violence, freedom of marriage, financial
independence, and education, the ACWF also, for the first time in Chinese history,
defined domestic work as formal labor. Given that many women still remained at
home in the 1950s, this redefinition of labor empowered many women who had not
yet found opportunities to work outside of their homes.

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Figure 12. A Mao-era propaganda poster showing a woman working in the engineering
profession. Translation: “We are proud of contributing to the industrialization of China.28

The ACWF also played a key diplomatic role for the Chinese government during
the Cold War. Given its difficulty in establishing diplomatic relationships as a
communist country, the Chinese government relied on the ACWF to reach out to
women’s movements abroad and engage with other countries despite the diplomatic
blockage.
In Historicizing Gender: A Study of Chinese Women’s Liberation from 1949 to
1966, Dong Limin pointed out:
We need to examine the practices of the women’s liberation movement of
the Seventeen-Year Period in relation to socialist practice of the same period,

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while also considering it in conjunction with socialist transformations

occurring before and after the period. When bringing in gender perspectives,
we need to better link theoretical concepts with local praxis and integrate
researchers’ own standpoints and concerns. It is only when such various
associations are effectively constructed that our study of the women’s
liberation movement during the Seventeen-Year Period – or any specific
practice in a specific historical period, for that matter – can have a serious
impact. In practice, such an approach might also give gender theory a more
concrete, fleshy presence.29

In describing the future of Chinese women’s studies, Li Xiaojiang, has called true
“localization” and “centralization,” gender discourse can truly acquire the power to
speak to the present and look towards the future.
Regardless of the negative social and cultural impact brought about by the Cultural
Revolution, its influence on and contributions to Chinese women’s liberation were
profound and lasting. Foot-binding had been banned at the beginning of the People’s
Republic of China and Mao Zedong famously claimed that women held half of the
sky. During the Cultural Revolution era, new marriage laws were passed, which for
the very first time granted women equal rights in choosing, marrying, and divorcing
their spouses.30
One of the direct outcomes of this change was that thousands of Chinese women
left their full-time wife duties and entered the workforce. Prior to the Cultural
Revolution days, the Communist Party encouraged local governments to build more
schools and increase the educational levels for women and girls. Many women to
this day still feel indebted to Mao and the Communist Party for the freedom and
liberation they brought to them.
Following the end of the Cultural Revolution, a series of feminist writings
began to emerge during the late 1970s and 1980s that provoked scholars to take the
perspectives of “grounded” and “individual” subjectivity standpoints. These also
signified the academic world’s determination to break from the past and integrate
the future. This reassessment and reexamination of gender studies work and its
relationship with socialist history have extended into the 1990s and 2000s. Many
Euro-American feminist works have been translated and become another source
of reference/framework for Chinese gender studies researchers. All of these now
provide a new framework for approaching studies of Chinese women, both in and
out of China.

GLOBALIZATION AND GENDER EQUALITY

In studying Chinese women’s experiences in China and abroad alike, the notion
of globalization and its role in affecting women’s experiences should be carefully
incorporated and examined. Globalization started to playing a key role in Chinese
communities’ lives in the 1990s – but not equally so. The economically more

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advantaged eastern part of China became bigger benefactors of the reforms and
increased amount of commerce. Globalization and economic reforms have brought
and are still bringing enormous changes, and the vast majority of the Chinese,
especially in the eastern regions, are experiencing them in more or less a positive
way.31 These changes are reflected in the mass migration from rural to urban areas
to seek better employment opportunities, more educational resources, higher living
standards, and greater possibilities to study abroad.
Li Xiaojiang, the founder of the gender studies discipline in China, challenged
one of the hegemonic critiques of globalization – that it only helps the capitalists.
Li stated that this kind of critique came from “western” society and assumes that it
only brought hardships to the so-called “poor” or “underdeveloped” nations. She
suggested that it could benefit all groups. China’s change confirms Li’s view, since
globalization has opened up opportunities for all groups, working people as well.
While it has certainly brought about negative elements to China, many women
have benefitted from it. For example, it has created more employment for women
who otherwise would not have a means to support themselves and be financially
independent. While these jobs might not be all that intellectual and high-level, this
experience is exactly the opposite of that of many Euro-American countries, where it
is perceived that globalization has caused them to lose jobs. The key when it comes
to studying globalization is that women’s voices must be heard, those of the women
who are living, experiencing, and getting adapted to the new economic and social
environment.
Using extensive oral history records of female revolutionary leaders and ordinary
women in the Chinese Communist Party, Li Xiaojiang has written extensively
regarding how Marxist and Maoist ideology supported the idea of nannü pingdeng,
or gender equality.32 For instance, one of Mao’s slogans for promoting gender
equality was funü neng ding banbiantian (妇女能顶半边天), or women hold up half
of the sky. The concept advocates for an equal share of resources and responsibilities
between women and men, and many gains in gender equality have been made.
Nevertheless, women still rarely hold prominent positions in key political, cultural,
and management positions in modern China.
Due to the unique Chinese cultural and political history, Chinese women’s
experiences cannot be analyzed from Euro-American feminist theories as, their
challenges, struggles, and lived daily lives are drastically different from their Euro-
American counterparts. In Li and Barlow’s writing regarding Chinese feminism,
modernity, and globalization, they noted:
Contemporary scholars (particularly in the West) are too habituated to systems
of thinking that draw on classificatory models and have situated China in the
“Asian development model” or “postsocialist model.” Yet, China and the other
Asian nations have never developed according to the same mode, and thus
there really is no common foundational developmental model at all. Those
analyses prematurely claim that China is “postsocialist,” because even now

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China strictly upholds a socialist (political) system and ideology. Because

China undertook globalization from within its own particular system scholars
must study China in its singularity if they wish to understand the relationship
of contemporary China to globalization.33
Another difference we need to acknowledge is that the Chinese promotion of
gender equality, at least in some ways, implies that women and men should hold the
same responsibilities, behave the same way, and achieve the same outcomes. This
view of gender equality is one-sided and narrow-minded. It implies that if women
act, talk, and dress like men, then gender equality is achieved. This is drastically
different from the Euro-American concept of gender equality, which comes from
recognizing the inequalities between women and men, and hence has created a
desire and drive for equal rights.
In fact, in my many years of studying the Chinese scientists and engineers, I
have heard many Chinese men comment that China has achieved absolute gender
equality because “there are laws that protect women,” or that women have the
right to vote and equal opportunity with men when it comes to education access.
Many Chinese male scientists I encountered considered pure numerical equality
to be gender equality. They are under the impression that gender issues no longer
exist as policies and methods to help women have been implemented. This kind of
mentality was commonly observed among many male scientists regardless of their
racial and ethnic backgrounds.

THE UNIQUENESS OF CHINESE FEMINISM

In the Mao era, the Chinese Communist Party endorsed a kind of state feminism
that monolithically defined gender equality as nannü pingdeng, which translates as
sexual equality between women and men. As noted above, one direct result of the
ideology of state feminism was the creation of the Women’s Federation in 1949. This
organization acted as the official leader and the government’s arm in leading the
women’s movement and promoting the government’s policy in sexual equality. The
understanding of feminist problems in that era came entirely from Marxist tradition,
where the inequalities were defined as “women’s problems.” The fundamental
causes of all of oppression of women were believed to be private ownership and
class inequality. The feminist propaganda promoted the belief that there was gender
equality within the peasant class; that, in other words, gender inequality was only
an upper class problem. The communist commune system of organizing work and
the equal distribution of work outcomes were believed to indicate the end of gender
inequality by many politicians and scholars.
At the beginning of the 1980s, with the economic reforms and the inclusion of
Chinese women representatives in the United Nations Conference on Women, more
Chinese feminist scholars began to look for a more accurate analytical framework
as a way of breaking away from the Marxist way of attributing women’s oppression

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and struggles to class and privatization. At that historical juncture, it was apparent
that over three decades of women’s participation in the commune style work life
had not yielded to sexual or gender equality by any standards. With the wave of
privatization, growth of the market-economy, and the influence of globalization,
Chinese feminist scholars gradually realized that gender was a socially constructed
concept and that the old Marxist communist state feminism framework no longer
met the need to analyze women’s experiences and challenges in the new era. Gender
equality needed to be interpreted in new ways.34
Surprisingly, the Chinese women I studied rarely talked about “class” and its
influence on Chinese society and culture. When I reviewed all of the data from my
interviews and field notes regarding the topics of women’s equality, the women’s
movement in China, and the current situation of Chinese women in both China and
U.S., I found that the concept had only come up once.
Class was not only a nearly taboo topic, it was also interpreted differently by
Chinese women scientists and engineers. The differences between the perception
of class were generational. The generation that was born and raised in the Mao
era associated “class” with communism and the Marxist notion of “class struggle”
versus “capitalism.”
The generation who were born and raised in the post-1980s era had minimal or
close to no understanding of class.35 This generation of Chinese has grown up in an
increasingly wealthy society that has enjoyed an unimaginable amount of material
wealth and influence from the west.
It has been a fascinating experience for me to observe the two generations of
Chinese women scientists and engineers interact, converse and collaborate with each
other. All of them came from and have been affected by the economic and historical
contexts in which they grew up. These contexts in turn affected their decisions about
going back to China in order to further their careers. One concern that was shared
by both generations were the discriminatory gender practices in many Chinese
institutions.
Do Chinese academic institutions and workplaces truly practice gender equality?
The current situation suggests that gender discrimination still widely exists. For
example, women doctoral degree recipients face discrimination when it comes to
recruitment. Many of them are denied opportunities to teach in top-tier institutions
because they are suspected of being guilty of hunyu nianling (婚育年龄), women
who are at the age of getting married and have children. Women are forced to retire
five years earlier than men. In the private sector, women are forced to retire at the
age of 50 while in academia they are required to retire at the age of 55. Another
women engineer in her late 40s noted that, even though the Chinese government
was trying to lift that stringent and discriminatory requirement, this practice is still
widely adopted and currently practiced.
Li Xiaojiang pointed out two nearly contradictory misconceptions that Euro-
American scholars have when it comes to studying Chinese women. The first myth
is that they believe Chinese women are “forerunners” when it comes to women’s

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liberation; the second myth is that they are living in a backward, underdeveloped,
and extremely conservative country.36
The state-instituted nannü pingdeng, or monolithically defined sexual equality,
carried a very hidden male agenda – women are equal to men in the sense that
they are like men. This attitude is still quite common, and views equality as more
assimilation than liberation. In over seven years of fieldwork, I have been referred to
by several Chinese male engineers and scientists as the woman social scientist who
wants to become a man. I realized that these men considered “gender equality” to
be that women have to be like men in order to be equal. In many Chinese people’s
minds, feminism has a very negative reputation. They think that feminists are “bunch
of nagging women who are trying to be manly and want equal rights which they
already have.”37
Li suggested that diasporic Chinese studies scholars should take advantage of
their trans-positional viewpoints and destabilize the experience, viewpoints, and
production of values from any given locational standpoint. Given the deep impact
that Chinese ancient and contemporary history has had on gender relations, we as
researchers have to take the historic perspective into consideration when it comes to
studying any Chinese women groups. Scholars who study Chinese women need to
be wary that there is no single definition of Chinese feminism or Chinese women. In
fact, there is not a single definition of what being Chinese means.
When it comes to studying Chinese women, everything needs to be examined
with “local” as a key word in mind. This “locality” does not refer to the geographic
location per se. It is defined as the multiple standpoints and perspectives that a
scholar should examine when it comes to a particular group of women. Study them
as members of distinctive groups, marked by their age, historical and subcultural
background, class, their educational experiences and backgrounds, as well as their
global networks and travel experience.
When it comes to studying Chinese immigrant women scientists and engineers,
Li suggested that researchers should adopt “globalized” yet “localized” Chinese
feminist perspectives. A “glocalized” lens allows scholars to take into consideration
the larger context of Chinese women’s experiences: Their educational journies,
mentoring experiences, and career advancement are all heavily influenced by
their transnational activities. It would enable researchers to situate any particular
group of Chinese women’s lives in their unique subcultural, ethnic, socioeconomic,
educational contexts and thus generate more culturally sensitive, less homogenous,
and less generalized viewpoints. This would be the most effective way to detect the
problems Chinese immigrant women are facing in their daily lives and professional
work and identify what is necessary to foster positive changes.
Furthermore, researchers could start from the women’s voices, dig deeper into
the information behind these voices, and cross analyze/compare the similarities and
differences between women within a certain group. Only when someone centers
Chinese women’s voices, then localizes their experiences by studying in depth about
what their past, family, class, subcultural, and educational experience and future

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goals are, can they ultimately learn the truth about what being a Chinese woman
in a male-dominated world in the U.S. means. These kinds of “globalized” and
“localized” feminist perspectives can also be adopted in studies of foreign-born
U.S.-educated women scientists and engineers from other countries.

NOTES
1
Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes, 161.
2
Sandra Harding, Sciences from Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2008): 114.
3
See Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of
Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14 (1988): 575–599.
4
bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990); Chela
Sandoval, “U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Differential Oppositional
Consciousness,” in The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies,
ed. Sandra Harding (New York: Routledge, 2004): 195–210.
5
Ya-Chen Chen, The Many Dimensions of Chinese Feminism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Jie
Tao, Bijun Zheng, and Shirley L. Mow, Holding Up Half the Sky: Chinese Women Past, Present, and
Future (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2004).
6
Harding, Sciences from Below, 234.
7
Ethnic minorities in China are the non-Han Chinese population in the People’s Republic of China. The
People’s Republic of China officially recognizes 54 ethnic minority groups within China in addition
to the Han majority. As of 2010, the combined population of officially recognized minority groups
comprised 8.49 percent of the population of mainland China.
8
Sandoval, “U.S. Third World Feminism.”
9
Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
2000).
10
Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.”
11
See Bim Adewunmi’s interview with Kimberlé Crenshaw: Bim Adewumni. “Kimberlé Crenshaw
on Intersectionality: ‘I Wanted to Come Up with a Metaphor Anyone Could Use,’” New Statesman,
April 2, 2014, http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/2014/04/kimberl-crenshaw-intersectionality-i-
wanted-come-everyday-metaphor-anyone-could (accessed August 20, 2015).
12
I, as an ethnographer and feminist scholar, have certainly been referred to by these names by Chinese
male scientists. They would either use those terms behind my back or occasionally joke with me about
it.
13
See Nanini Visvanathan, Lynn Duggan, Nan Wiegersma, and Laurie Nisonoff, The Women, Gender
and Development Reader, 2nd ed. (London: Zed Books, 2011).
14
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,”
Feminist Review, no. 30 (October 1988): 61–88.
15
Maria Mies, The Lace Makers of Narsapur: Indian Housewives Produce for the World Market (North
Melbourne, Australia: Spinifex Press, 2012).
16
Lydia He Liu, Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko, The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in
Transnational Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
17
See Liu, Karl, and Ko, The Birth of Chinese Feminism, 4.
18
See Liu, Karl, and Ko, The Birth of Chinese Feminism, 4.
19
Image retrieved from feminisminchina.com.
20
See Liu, Karl, and Ko, The Birth of Chinese Feminism.
21
Lu Meiyi and Zheng Yongfu, Zhongguo funu yundong (1840–1921) (The Chinese Women’s Movement
[1840–1921]) (Zhengzhou: Henan remin chubanshe, 1990).
22
Courtesy of the Institute of Chinese Studies, Library, Heidelberg University, http://womag.
uni-hd.de/public/magazine/page_content.php?magazin_id=1&year=1911&issue_id=26&issue_
number=002&img_issue_page=1 (accessed May 19, 2015).

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23
Tao, Zheng, and Mow, Holding Up Half the Sky.
24
Cai Yuanpei (蔡元培) was the president of Peking University during the May Fourth Movement.
He was known for his critical assessment of Chinese culture and promotion of Chinese and Euro-
American thinking, including anarchism. At Peking University he assembled influential figures in the
New Culture and May Fourth Movements.
25
See Luo Sunwen, Women and Contemporary Chinese Society (Shanghai: Shanghai Renmin
Chubanshe, 1986).
26
The old naming tradition in China only referred women by their family name. They did not have given
names. Hence, a woman was referred to by her father’s last name when she was born and then by her
husband’s last name when she got married.
27
Dong Limin, in “Other Genders, Other Sexualities: Chinese Differences,” A Journal of Feminist
Cultural Studies 24, no. 2 [special issue] (2013), https://www.dukeupress.edu/other-genders-other-
sexualities-chinese-differences
28
The image is from the IISH / Stefan R. Landsberger Collections, retrieved from chineseposters.net
with author’s permission.
29
Dong Limin, “Historicizing Gender: A Study of Chinese Women’s Liberation From 1949 to 1966,”
Differences 24, no. 2 (2013): 93–108.
30
Xinran, The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2003).
31
Xiaojiang Li and Mary E. John, “Women and Feminism in China and India: A Conversation with Li
Xiaojiang,” Economic and Political Weekly 40, no. 16 (2005): 1594–1597.
32
Xiaojiang Li, “With What Discourse Do We Reflect on Chinese Women? Thoughts on Transnational
Feminism in China,” in Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China, ed.
Mayfair Mei-hui Yang (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999): 261–277.
33
Xiaojiang Li and Tani E. Barlow, “From ‘Modernization’ to ‘Globalization’: Where Are Chinese
Women?” Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society 26, no. 4 (2001): 1274–1278.
34
Wang Zheng and Ying Zhang, “Global Concepts, Local Practices: Chinese Feminism Since the Fourth
U.N. Conference on Women,” Feminist Studies 36, no. 1 (2010): 40–70.
35
See Li and John, “Women and Feminism in China and India: A Conversation with Li Xiaojiang,” 1,
https://www.academia.edu/1205732/Women_and_feminism_in_China_and_India_a_conversation_
with_Li_Xiaojiang. Li Xiaojiang noted “the notion of a ‘post-Mao period’ is commonly found in
Euro-American academic and political circles to refer to China’s history after the death of Mao
Zedong. They retain Mao’s name possibly because they think that no major changes have occurred
in China’s political system after the Mao era. But this expression is not used in China. I believe that
there has been a major political shift, indeed a termination of the Mao era since the 1980s. Subsequent
developments do not fit within the Maoist framework – the first of these is what we have called
‘modernisation’, especially reforms in the field of economics.”
36
See Shu-Mei Shih, “Towards an Ethics of Transnational Encounter, or ‘When’ Does a ‘Chinese’
Woman Become a ‘Feminist’?” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13, no. 2 (2002):
90–126.
37
This is a quote from one of several conversations with an older Chinese male scientist. He never
bought into the idea of gender equality in science and engineering. He expressed on multiple occasions
his view that men and women are biologically different and that they would never be equal.

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CONCLUSION

NEVER THE MAIN PLAYER: THE REALITY

Although we see a large representation of Chinese women in the U.S. science and
engineering workforce, looking across the wide range of industry and academia
positions, one common pattern stands out: Chinese women are never the key players.
As Harding put it in her groundbreaking book, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?:
Thinking From Women’s Lives: “The issue is not that there are few women in science,
for there are vast numbers of women with science degrees working in the scientific
enterprise. The issue, instead, is why there are so few women directing the agendas
of science.”1
Gender is socially constructed and its intersections with race, nationality, and
socioeconomic status all affect the role gender plays in a given community and
an individual’s lived experience. In the Chinese women scientists’ and engineers’
community, I found the notions of Chineseness and gender intersected with
socioeconomic status, subcultures within the Chinese context, and their varying
experiences in undergraduate institutions in China. The combination of these factors
makes the experiences each Chinese woman scientist and engineer has in the U.S.
very different.
There is no singular experience for immigrant Chinese women scientists and
engineers. They are not a homogenous group, but reflect the many differences in
today’s China. Chinese scientists and engineers have their own gender and class
hierarchies within the community, reflecting considerably different geographic,
family, socioeconomic, and subcultural backgrounds. Due to the imbalanced
economic development in China, the eastern region has become significantly more
developed than the western regions, and thus students who come from metropolitan
areas are more likely to have better language skills and more financial support from
their families. My observations indicated that the more outspoken women in the
group were most likely to be from one of the big cities in China. In particular, the
few women within the engineering fields who constantly discussed feminist ideas
were raised in families of highly educated women.
Even though this group of women recently migrated to the U.S., they had not
followed the traditional pattern of migrants from Asia. For example, for the most part
they did not rely on family ties in the U.S. to find jobs and advance their education.
They came to the U.S. for social mobility and to pursue the American dream, yet
largely remained in the margin of American academic and social life regardless of

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their high representation in the U.S. science and engineering academic programs
and workforce. Once they arrived, they faced a myriad of challenges in their career
development, including many cultural and gendered stereotypes widely embedded
in the science and engineering professions.
These factors not only impacted their first few years of academic studies in the
U.S. but also affected their long-term careers and personal lives. Three themes that
interweave throughout the book are mentoring experiences, career development,
and work-life balance. The power of mentoring cannot be underestimated in any of
the highly educated and highly achieved Chinese women scientists’ and engineers’
lives. Given that they encounter much self-doubt and many challenges posed by
cultural, immigration, language and racial discriminations, the impact of mentors
can be profound. Although it has been difficult for many Chinese women to find
mentors at their institutions, the mentoring relationships based on Chinese ties have
helped them achieve many personal and professional breakthroughs throughout their
careers. Mentoring creates long-term and kinship-like relationships among Chinese
women scientists. Many of the women I studied had their personal and professional
breakthroughs under their mentors’ guidance.
When they could not find adequate mentoring they turned to the guanxi networks.
Long-term strong connections based on gift and favor exchanges are considered to
be guanxi. Guanxi are considered to be more than just “networks” or “connections.”
They are the special kind of multi-directional connections that are built among the
Chinese community after long periods of testing, favor exchanging, and mutual
trust building. Written forms of agreement are rarely established. Oral agreement is
highly desired and people who belong to the same guanxi networks are considered
to be part of trusted inner circles.
Career development occurs largely through the guanxi networks. The reliance on
guanxi may have declined in China itself in recent years, with less need for being
politically connected to survive, but I found the guanxi networks still play an active
role in the overseas Chinese communities, including the scientific and engineering
ones. Although the Chinese women in this study did not seem to recognize
networking as intentional, many of Chinese women subconsciously utilized their
guanxi networks to enhance their careers. If they encountered significant professional
challenges, such as visa problems, then guanxi networks served as a support system.
Occasionally, trusted friends in their guanxi networks helped them to resolve the
problems or strategically withdraw from certain collaborative projects or teams.
Despite the considerable influence of Chinese culture and Chinese connections,
I have found that these women’s collective behavior was affected less by cultural
values and practices and more by the simple lack of resources and support during
their transition into American society and academia. In response, the group of
women created informal networks, gathered tacit knowledge from the Chinese
science and engineering community, and relied on each other. They have invented
creative ways to utilize their personal and informal networks in order to survive
living in the margins.

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Work-life balance seems to be an age-old topic when it comes to women’s career

development. It remains the biggest concern among Chinese women scientists and
engineers I studied. Many of them were worried about not being able to advance in
their careers once they had children. As with professional women everywhere, they
were constantly searching for the magic of “doing it all.” As economics professor
Sharon Poczter explained:

The antiquated rhetoric of “having it all” disregards the basis of every

economic relationship: the idea of trade-offs. All of us are dealing with the
constrained optimization that is life, attempting to maximize our utility based
on parameters like careers, kids, relationships, etc., doing our best to allocate
the resource of time.2

RETURNING TO CHINA

China is thriving economically. Attracting and managing its diasporic community

of scientists and engineers has become one of the priorities for the new
generation of Chinese leadership. The government has embarked on a number of
initiatives to encourage overseas Chinese to return to China, especially scientists
and engineers.
These efforts have been successful in attracting a good number of highly educated
male scientists and engineers to return – but very few females. An interesting
phenomenon is that many men choose to leave their young families in America
while they commute internationally. This choice appears to be appealing and has
been widely adopted by many middle-aged Chinese male scientists.
However, very few women wish to return. They resist because many traditional
sexist cultures and beliefs persist, which makes women’s advancement in leadership
roles in China, especially in science and engineering, extremely difficult. The women
I studied told me that the male-dominated culture is still prevalent in selecting
candidates, grant applications, promotion and career opportunities. Returning to
China also means giving up freedom of speech, and internet censorship appeared to
be a major concern as well.
Two additional factors affecting women’s decisions to return are the “filial piety”
and “collectivism” deeply embedded in the Chinese society and value system.
Filial piety, or xiao shun (孝顺), refers to the blind respect for the old and doing
whatever the elderly ask the younger generations in the family to do. Children must
do everything they can to take care of their parents and grandparents even at the cost
of sacrificing their own careers and personal lives.
However, fulfilling the duty of taking care of aging parents no longer necessarily
requires returning to China. Among other changes, it is now much easier to visit
China regularly and keep in touch through modern communications. Instead, many
U.S.-educated Chinese women scientists are now choosing to establish their careers
in the U.S. and then move their parents closer to them. This is especially true when

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these women’s spouses are also Chinese scientists or engineers. The parents usually
come to the U.S. when they start a family and help perform child-care duties for
their children. They often visit for six-month periods, which is the maximum amount
allowed on a U.S. tourist visa.
Collectivism is a slightly harder concept to grasp, but it permeates all facets of
Chinese personal, professional, and family life. It is the idea that the needs of the
group take priority over the needs of the individual. Collectivism plays a greater role
when the Chinese women scientist or engineer is single or has a significant other
who lives in China. Her family is more likely to then push her to move back to China
as soon as she completes graduate school a postdoctoral position. Although many
Chinese women would personally like to remain in the U.S. to pursue their careers
and dreams, and virtually all of the women I studied were able to do so, they are
under tremendous pressure to return due to family expectations.
A personal story can illustrate this perfectly. During my most recent visit to
China, I was asked more than ten times about when I would have my first child.
Some people were also curious about whether I worried about having trouble
finding a husband when I decided to pursue my doctorate given that highly educated
women are not the most desirable in China. At first I was shocked and felt very
uncomfortable over these highly personal and seemingly offensive questions. Then,
several Chinese women scientists who have extensively contributed to my research
over the years reminded me that those questions are all due to the collective side of
Chinese culture. One woman stated, “Everything in China is a group decision. Your
major, your degree, your career, your spouse choice, your child-bearing and rearing,
and even your health information!”
Viewed from the Euro-American cultural perspective, these aspects of Chinese
culture can be suffocating and leave Chinese women no privacy or freedom to pursue
their careers. However, despite all of these obstacles, many women are succeeding.
One thing I have witnessed in China is a kind of chaotic harmony. It seems that many
generations of Chinese women scientists and engineers have adjusted and “leaned
in,” and yet still managed to advance their personal and professional goals.3 This
includes my family’s history as women in science and engineering leadership roles,
discussed at the beginning of this book.

MOVING FORWARD

This book has pointed out the need for further research: Chinese women scientists
and engineers make up a big portion of the U.S. science and engineering workforce;
yet the transnational ties they strategically cultivate have rarely been studied.
The women scientists and engineers in this study did not regard these types of
connections as “transnational networks”; rather, these trust, ethnicity, educational
institutional-based ties were considered to be their coping strategies. These ties
not only helped them through the initial phase of their graduate school careers but
also expanded into their professional and career development. They illustrate the

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myriad ways that Chinese women scientists and engineers utilize various networks,
including social media, to survive challenging environments and succeed in the
pursuit of their dreams.
In studying the gender issues of Chinese women and men, researchers need to start
from the women’s voices, to dig deeper into the information behind these voices, and
to cross-analyze/compare the similarities and differences between women within a
certain group. Only when someone centers Chinese women’s voices, then localizes
their experience by studying their past, family, class, subculture, educational
experience, and future goals, can they ultimately learn the truth about what being a
Chinese woman in a male-dominated field in the U.S. means.
It is also important to study women scientists and engineers from other cultures
and nationalities, and compare their experiences to the Chinese women in this study.
This book discussed Chinese women scientists’ and engineers’ experiences, but
much of it is not unique to Chinese women. Many international women scientists
and engineers in the U.S. share similar stories, experiences, and struggles. Are the
stories and experiences discussed here representative of other cultural groups and
other disciplines? The discussions, hypotheses, and findings from this book can serve
as a methodological and theoretical springboard for further studies of immigrant
women in the U.S. Are their experiences impacted by their racial, gender, ethnic,
cultural, educational, and socioeconomic status? Do most of them subconsciously
mentor other women of similar backgrounds but not consider this as strategic? Do
they all cultivate cultural-based networks, and if so, what are the similarities and
differences? These are all great questions to expand and explore for future studies on
foreign-born women’s professional development in the U.S.
Last but not least, we cannot underestimate the unique challenges that
Chinese women scientists and engineers are facing regardless of their choice
to remain in the U.S. or return to China. The causes of the challenges in the
U.S. are discrimination based on their immigration status, language skills, and
stereotypes based on their gender and ethnicity. However, it is clear that many
Chinese women choose to stay in the U.S. even if it is at the cost of their career
advancement, even if this means that they face discrimination due to their limited
English skills, even if they are being looked down on due to stereotypes of docile
Chinese women.
Many of the Chinese women I studied argued that they would face even greater
challenges if they returned to China. This is mainly due to the traditional Chinese
male-dominated and hostile culture towards highly educated women. Many
Chinese, both men and women, have extreme biases against highly accomplished
women, including doubting their ability to find a spouse, to be a good wife and
mother, and to take care of their families. It is still widely believed in China that
Chinese women, regardless of their educational level and socioeconomic status,
are supposed to be married and have their first child before they turn 30. They are
not supposed to speak up in front of large groups of people, especially in front of
authorities and the elderly.

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Chinese women, either in China or the U.S., should not be afraid to pursue their
dreams. I discovered a diary from my grandmother’s old notebook during the era
when she played a leadership role in the Chinese women’s movement. Coincidentally
(or perhaps logically), it was placed in the same shoebox with Mao’s Little Red Book.
I opened up the notebook and the first page read, “It is Chairman Mao’s highest
direction that women hold up half the sky.” That statement represents the old Chinese
feminism of the Mao era, which focused on the pursuit of sheer equality in numbers.
This then popular gender equality policy also set a tone for modern day gender
equality in China on a mass, systematic and institutionalized level. As a result, many
policymakers continue to believe that since women and men’s representations in the
workforce are equal, China has achieved gender equality.
While this approach might have worked in increasing women’s participation in
the workforce during my grandmother’s era, today’s Chinese women need more than
social efforts to overturn a largely male-centered science and engineering culture in
China. Chinese policy and cultural shifts on the institutional level should take into
account Chinese women’s needs and challenges and create mentoring opportunities
and career advancement paths that will allow them to grow and develop their potential.
In the U.S., while it is empowering to encourage Chinese women to be courageous
in pursuing their degrees in science and engineering, systemic, institutionalized
programs that assist Chinese women to grow and overcome challenges are missing.
The NSF ADVANCE program has had a significant impact on many institutional
transformations and cultural shifts when it comes to advancing women and minorities
in academic science and engineering. Considering the increasing participation of
Chinese-born women scientists and engineers in U.S. academia, NSF policymakers
should consider incorporating programs and initiatives that address the unique
challenges facing Chinese and other foreign-born women in order to help them
succeed in U.S. academia and in turn mentor the next generation.

PROACTIVE SOLUTIONS

Many Chinese women mentioned the concept of hui ku de hai zi you nai chi
(会哭的孩子有奶吃) or “The baby that cries the most gets fed.” This saying is
similar to “It’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease.” While social and institutional
changes and efforts can help to create an environment in which women can succeed,
at the end of the day each individual woman should be encouraged to take advantage
of the opportunities that are out there. Among the many reasons that women receive
lower pay and fewer raises is simply that men bargain more aggressively when hired
and ask for raises more often. Men get more grants because they apply for more
grants.
More proactive solutions are required. Institutions should design programs
and  provide resources that encourage and empower Chinese women to pursue
educational experiences and career goals. Taking calculated risks is a key part
of succeeding in U.S. graduate school, as it is in the workplace anywhere in the

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world, and women should not be discouraged by vicious comments from one or
two ignorant and thoughtless men. While Chinese women must not reject Chinese
cultural traditions they should learn strategic ways to set themselves free from
Chinese social traditions that inhibit their adaption to American practices, which are
based on American cultural values and traditions. They should do so patiently and
with respect, but remain determined.
In particular, institutions, graduate programs, or their advisors should have
training programs to encourage Chinese women students to challenge their peers’ and
professors’ thinking, to ask questions. New students need to be told this explicitly,
and be made to understand that students are expected to take an active role. For most
people the transition from undergraduate- and graduate-level work is difficult, and
to go from a highly structured, Confucian-style Chinese undergraduate environment
to a much freer and more open American graduate one, in a different language,
is especially taxing. Students cannot be expected to figure it all out on their own.
As I noted, many women students drop out along the way, overwhelmed by the
difficulties. Proactive assistance on the institutional level at the very beginning could
help them overcome the initial hurdles and significantly reduce the attrition rate.
Language is one of the biggest barriers, for Chinese women especially the formal
academic English required for scientific and technical writing. The transition from
an ideographic language to an alphabetical one is especially challenging. Scientific
and engineering both require very precise language. Even most native English
speakers have difficulty understanding technical and scientific documents written in
formal academic English, and even more difficulty in writing them.
Foreign-born non-native English-speaking students seeking careers in English-
speaking countries need to be proactive in assuring their writing is excellent and meets
the highest professional standards; written documents are the way they communicate
with their communities of practice. While schools may offer writing labs and tutors,
more established Chinese-born scientists and engineers and the institutions should
educate newcomers about the benefits and importance of peer review.
In the chapter on Chinese women’s challenges and coping strategies, I described
the advice that some of the more senior Chinese scientists gave to young women
scientists regarding discrimination, sexual harassment and other challenges, some
of which should be understood and implemented on a institutional level. Adviser
relationships should be a topic that graduate programs in the U.S. address formally
with all international women students. While it is important to maintain a positive
working relationship, any harassment behaviors from advisers should be reported
and resources should be provided to these women prior to the start of their programs.
These behaviors not only include sexual harassment, but also harassment of personal
time, forcing them to work long hours, threatening to not sponsor their visas or their
doctoral study, and other detrimental practices.
Another aspect of graduate student-advisor relationships lies in educating
international graduate students that they should not be devastated if their adviser
refuses to provide them any feedback on their research. Instead, they should seek

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other professors’ advice and potentially change to a different adviser. Graduate

school in the U.S. is complicated and the idolization of doctoral advisers based
on the traditional Confucian philosophy mentioned in previous chapters could be
detrimental to some Chinese women and thus should be avoided.
On the other side of the Pacific Ocean, gender equality has clearly not been a
priority in the Chinese government’s initiatives to attract overseas scientists and
engineers during the past decade. It must become so if the Chinese people are to
achieve their goal of leading the world in scientific research and development.
Chinese women remain invisible in both China and the U.S. How can their Chinese
Dreams or American Dreams come true under such circumstances? Perhaps, these
dreams will remain dreams as the brave, dedicated, and proud group of Chinese-born
women scientists and engineers survive and thrive in the margins of both the country
they were born into and the country they emigrated to.
We came a long way, yet we still have a long way to go.

NOTES
1
Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Women’s Lives (New York:
Cornell University Press, 1991): 61.
2
Sharon Poczter, “For Women in the Workplace, It’s Time to Abandon ‘Having it All’ Rhetoric,” Forbes,
June 25, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/06/25/for-women-in-the-workplace-its-
time-to-abandon-have-it-all-rhetoric/ (accessed July 20, 2015).
3
Sandberg, Sheryl, and Nell Scovell. 2013. Lean in: women, work, and the will to lead.

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